Metro Pulse/Secret History/Correzione

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The Italians who were here before the first ones

by Jack Neely

Back in April, coinciding with our first annual Italian Festival, I wrote a column about our tiny but dynamic Italian minority in the late 19th century: namely the Marmoras, Reboris, and Brichettos, confectioners who came to town in the 1880s and '90s. I was confident that the first of them, Raf Marmora, who arrived around 1883, was the first Italian immigrant to make his home permanently in Knoxville, and that he was for a time the only Italian merchant here.

It's always dangerous to make assumptions, especially with a town as peculiar as ours, and I should have known better. After that column came out I heard from several Italian descendants who had one thing or another to add, but nobody corrected me about my basic assertion. It may be that no one in town remembers the Italian family who lived in town decades before Signor Marmora's arrival.

It came to me in one of those seren- dipitous moments that whop you in the head every now and then. I was riding a bike through Old Gray Cemetery. Coasting around in the cool shade of the big oak trees in that weathered city of the dead offers a rare sort of peace. You see new flowers and Victorian graves, life and death. It makes for a profound sort of lunch break.

Every time I walk or ride around Old Gray, at least one grave surprises me. This time, it popped up at me as I was making my way around the turn in the southwest corner of the cemetery. I didn't have much excuse for missing it. It has been there, right out in the open, legible from the lane, for 113 years.

The marble stone says, plain as day, PETER J. RICARDI. I'd run across that last name in old newspapers and city directories before, and paused just long enough to assume it was likely Swiss, or one of those odd English or Irish names that happens to look Italian just because of a vowel on the end. But I stopped, got off my bike, and read the rest of the stone. BORN IN MOMO PROV. OF NOVARO, ITALY, APRIL 19, 1827. DIED APRIL 17, 1889.

This guy died not long after the arrival of what I'd assumed to be the first Italians. I went to McClung and looked him up in the old obituary files. It turns out he was someone a true historian would have known about.

Peter—or Pietro—Ricardi came to Knoxville as a young man of 25, probably fleeing civil war and instability at home. Momo is a small town in Italian Piedmont, west of Milan. The area had been politically unstable for years, and in the late 1840s, Field Marshal Radetzky was pushing his Austrian army across the Piedmont, scattering the Italian peasants struggling for nationhood. Maybe Ricardi just had had enough.

Knoxville was then a town of maybe 3,000, a stranded leftover of frontier-capital days, which wouldn't seem to have much to offer immigrants. Still they came in waves, hundreds from Switzerland, Germany, and Ireland, many of them refugees from war and famine in Europe. Knoxville may not have seemed like much, but to many, it was better than home. Ricardi got here in 1852, just in time for the opening of East Tennessee's first Catholic Church, Immaculate Conception, which would be his church for the rest of his life.

As the newspaper said, "he literally grew up with the city." In 37 years, Ricardi would witness Knoxville boom as an industrial city nearly 10 times the size of the town he arrived in. He was a confectioner, as his later countrymen would be, selling fruits and candies to downtown crowds. There was another, older Ricardi, John—or Giovanni—who was probably his brother, who was also a confectioner, as well as at least one woman of that name and approximate age, perhaps a sister.

Peter Ricardi married another immigrant, an Englishwoman named Mary Jane who came over about the same time he did. A letter in the file implies that they had at least one daughter, but no children are mentioned as survivors in the obituary. There's a blurry picture of a balding man with a gray mustache and goatee.

"Being frugal and industrious, he gradually acquired a huge amount of real estate that is now in the heart of the city," the eulogy went. As Knoxville boomed, so did this enterprising candymaker's fortunes. Much of his property was along Gay Street; the Miller's Building was later constructed on old Ricardi land. Besides his profits from sales, he made $7-8,000 annually in rent, a pretty good income in the 1880s: over $100,000 in today's dollars, and tax-free. It may have been a lie that America's streets were paved with gold, but for several poor Italian immigrants, beginning with Ricardi, Knoxville's were.

The Ricardis lived on Oxford Street, one of several short little residential streets that once connected Walnut and Locust over in the vicinity of what's now the fire station.

Ricardi's hard work may have worn him out. He was not quite 62 when he died of heart failure in 1889, just as some of the other Italians were arriving. His less prominent older brother John Ricardi survived to the age of 80. He's not buried in Old Gray with his wealthy brother, but in Calvary Cemetery, the old Catholic graveyard in East Knoxville.

By the time his fellow confectioner Rafael Marmora arrived in Knoxville, Peter Ricardi had lived here for over 30 years, more than half his life. Maybe it was even long enough for some folks to forget he was Italian. But just because I blundered across his grave the other day, I won't assume he was the first.