When immigrants from the poor southern regions of Italy first started coming to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, they settled all over the country. Many found themselves alongside the country’s coasts, lured by the opportunity to strike up professions as fishermen. Boston, New York, and San Francisco became major enclaves, welcoming generations of Italians who laid deep, intergenerational roots, the echoes of which can still be seen today in the cities’ Little Italy neighborhoods. But these immigrants also settled in perhaps lesser-known areas of the United States, such as Omaha, Nebraska.
Since 1925, the city of Omaha and its Italian inhabitants have been celebrating their faith in Saint Lucy through the four-day-long Santa Lucia Festival. The celebration was founded by Italian immigrant Grazia Bonafede Caniglia, who came to the city from Carlentini, Sicily in 1900. Caniglia wanted to recreate her hometown’s Santa Lucia Festival in Omaha’s burgeoning Italian enclave as a way for her fellow immigrants to maintain a strong connection to their homeland while also nurturing their faith in their new country.
Omaha’s Little Italy has a rich history. Not only was it a settling spot for Sicilian immigrants, but also for Union Pacific Railroad workers, and was also a major bootlegging hub during Prohibition. Santa Lucia Festival workers estimate that around 70% of the neighborhood’s descendants came from the Sicilian city of Carlentini, where the devotion to Saint Lucy is still strong.
The statue that is at the center of the Santa Lucia Festival was Caniglia’s brainchild. She enlisted Italian immigrants to go door-to-door in the neighborhood collecting money so that the statue of their beloved saint could be designed and transported by boat from Italy to the United States. The community was able to raise $2,000 to bring their dream to life. The resulting product was a statue of Santa Lucia holding a tray carrying her eyes, to symbolize the way in which they were brutally taken from her in life. Each year since 1925, the statue has been decorated with gold jewelry donated by her followers, and some of the jewels that drape across the statue today date back to the festival’s early days.
In 2022, Carlentini’s mayor Giuseppe Stefio visited Omaha to acknowledge the link that the Sicilian city and the descendants of those first Italian immigrants continue to share. “I felt very deep feelings because more than 5,000 miles away, far from home we felt a community,” Stefio said. Carlentini also became Omaha’s newest sister city, permanently joining the two communities together.
This year’s Santa Lucia Festival is scheduled to take place between August 3rd and 6th. While the program is still being decided, it will most likely contain live music, food, and entertainment, as has been the case over the nearly 100 years the festival has existed.
Asia London Palomba
Asia London Palomba is a trilingual freelance journalist from Rome, Italy. In the past, her work on culture, travel, and history has been published in The Boston Globe, Atlas Obscura, The Christian Science Monitor, and Grub Street, New York Magazine's food section. In her free time, Asia enjoys traveling home to Italy to spend time with family and friends, drinking Hugo Spritzes, and making her nonna's homemade cavatelli.