David F. Menicucci's 'Two Centuries to Freedom' delves into a family's journey

It was about 12 years ago when David F. Menicucci began sorting through a pile of seemingly unrelated material about his family.

“And I mean a pile. Historical documents, old letters, pictures, recordings, old newspaper articles,” Menicucci said in a phone interview.

“I sorted things in different categories. I stepped back and asked myself, ‘Is there a story here?’ I knew there was, but is there a documented story? Is there enough direct evidence to support this story, to verify family lore, or not?”

Menicucci concluded that indeed there was sufficient evidence. “It is a true account of actual events described in the context of history,” he said.

Maybe it’s a history in layers — a family’s, with flashes of a province’s, a nation’s and the world’s.

Menicucci’s conclusion has resulted in his authorship of the newly published book “Two Centuries to Freedom: The True Story of One Family’s Two-Century Migration from Lucca, Italy, to New Mexico and Other American States.”

The book’s main focus is the author’s family, the Menicuccis. But it casts a wide net in mentioning other families who immigrated to the United States from the same northern Italian province of Lucca and ended up in Albuquerque.

The book details the hardscrabble life in Lucca for the Menicucci family — the few years of basic public education the children received, the deeply religious ties to the Catholic Church, the family’s industry on the farm and at home, their meals, their love of wine and porcini mushrooms.

The author’s grandfather Giulio (later changed to Julio) and his brother Amerigo grew up dirt-peasant poor under the oppressive mezzadria sharecropping system. Because of the family’s low socioeconomic status, life would be a dead-end for the teenagers if they remained in Italy.

The American Revolution and its powerful spinoff concept of political freedom were early inspirations for generations of the Menicucci family, the author said.

Here was a country, the United States, that was established without a king, a harsh contrast to the monarchies that governed Italy and other European countries, the author said.

The family also heard the widely circulated stories of the economic opportunities in America’s free-market capitalist system, the book states.

From the mid-19th century forward into the early 20th century, Lucca sent many of its young people to work in America. If they found jobs, they were expected to send home some of their earnings.

The hard-working Menicucci brothers Giulio and Amerigo wanted to cross the Atlantic to seek their fortune there, too. They did, in the first decade of the 20th century. Giulio came first.

The brothers were hired to work in a Hancock, Michigan, copper mine.

Underground mining, they soon found out, was dangerous duty. They almost suffocated to death in one cave-in.

Then the brothers took jobs at a foundry in Kankakee, Illinois. In both communities, they stayed in rooms rented from welcoming Italian American families who had earlier emigrated from Lucca.

In late 1917, with the U.S. at war, the brothers faced the possibility of induction in the army. Fearing they might be split up, the brothers moved to Albuquerque where they had an aunt, a cousin and close friends from Lucca, the three Matteucci brothers.

The two Menicucci brothers waited in the Duke City before traveling to Camp Cody, an army training facility near Deming, where they enlisted.

The author said when he was young he lived down the street from Julio and he had an open invitation to visit him. He pedaled his bicycle over.

“I was often invited to join Julio, Amerigo and their friend Victorio Bachechi on fishing, hunting and (porcini) mushroom-gathering trips to the Jemez Mountains,” the author writes.

Gathering and drying porcini mushroom for dishes was a favorite culinary tradition in Lucca, he added.

The author referred to the two brothers and their wives, women from Lucca, as “the original New Mexico Menicucci patriarchs.”

The 642-page book includes a bibliography and references, appendices and indices and extensive end-of-chapter notes. Menicucci advises readers to concentrate on the narrative and skip the notes in their first reading of the book.

The narrative could have been more tightly organized to deal with the abundance — overabundance, actually — of information the author compiled.

Menicucci, the 74-year-old author, is a professional researcher retired from Sandia National Laboratories and is a former research faculty member at the University of New Mexico.