Author | Angelo F. Coniglio |
---|---|
Original title | The Lady of the Wheel (La Ruotaia) |
Country | Sicily |
Language | English and Sicilian |
Genre | Fiction |
Publisher | Legas |
Publication date | 2012 |
Media type | Print (Paperback) |
ISBN | 1881901-86-6 |
The Lady of the Wheel (La Ruotaia) is a 2012 historical fiction novel [1] by Sicilian American author Angelo F. Coniglio. The book follows the life of a girl who was abandoned as an infant, with the major themes of the book including poverty, exploitation and family values. [2] [3] [4] [5] Coniglio's work has been compared to the verismo (realism) of Sicilian author Giovanni Verga. [6] [7]
A mother abandons an infant girl, placing her inside a 'foundling wheel' to be cared for in a foundling home, and the woman's husband gives up a young son as a carusu, a virtual slave in a sulfur mine; both actions intended to help the remaining family to survive in poverty-stricken Racalmuto, in late-1800s Sicily. It was common for families to give up their boys at the age of five as carusi, selling them to the mining company for life for a small price, and the parents treat it matter-of-factly as a regrettable but unavoidable decision. The plot follows the girl's life as a foundling, and her brother's labors in the mine, working ten-hour days in hellish conditions, and their interactions with family and co-workers. As plot devices, the author includes examples of Napoleon-inspired recording of civil documents, and describes the Sicilian conventions for selecting the given names of a family's children.
Child abandonment is the practice of relinquishing interests and claims over one's offspring in an illegal way, with the intent of never resuming or reasserting guardianship. The phrase is typically used to describe the physical abandonment of a child. Still, it can also include severe cases of neglect and emotional abandonment, such as when parents fail to provide financial and emotional support for children over an extended period. An abandoned child is referred to as a foundling. Baby dumping refers to parents leaving a child younger than 12 months in a public or private place with the intent of terminating their care for the child. It is also known as rehoming when adoptive parents use illegal means, such as the internet, to find new homes for their children. In the case where child abandonment is anonymous within the first 12 months, it may be referred to as secret child abandonment.
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was the youngest child of United States President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. His elder siblings were Caroline, John Jr., and Arabella.
A foundling hospital was originally an institution for the reception of foundlings, i.e., children who had been abandoned or exposed, and left for the public to find and save. A foundling hospital was not necessarily a medical hospital, but more commonly a children's home, offering shelter and education to foundlings.
A baby hatch or baby box is a place where people can leave babies, usually newborn, anonymously in a safe place to be found and cared for. This was common from the Middle Ages to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the device was known as a foundling wheel. Foundling wheels were abandoned in the late 19th century, but a modern form, the baby hatch, was reintroduced from 1952 and since 2000 has been adopted in many countries, most notably in Pakistan where there are more than 300. They can also be found in Germany (100), the United States (150), Czech Republic (88) and Poland (67).
Albert John (Al) Loquasto (Jr.), was an American racecar driver.
Serradifalco is a town and comune in the province of Caltanissetta, Sicily, Italy.
Racalmuto is a comune (municipality) in the Province of Agrigento in the Italian Autonomous Region of Sicily, located about 90 kilometres (56 mi) southeast of Palermo and about 15 kilometres (9 mi) northeast of Agrigento.
The Ospedale degli Innocenti 'Hospital of the Innocents', also known in old Tuscan dialect as the Spedale degli Innocenti, is a historic building in Florence, Italy. It was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, who received the commission in 1419 from the Arte della Seta. It was originally a children's orphanage. It is regarded as a notable example of early Italian Renaissance architecture. The hospital, which features a nine bay loggia facing the Piazza SS. Annunziata, was built and managed by the "Arte della Seta" or Silk Guild of Florence. That guild was one of the wealthiest in the city and, like most guilds, took upon itself philanthropic duties.
The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating from about 200,000 children. The co-founders of the Orphan Train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but this was not always true. They were mostly the children of new immigrants and the children of the poor and destitute families living in these cities. Criticisms of the program include ineffective screening of caretakers, insufficient follow-ups on placements, and that many children were used as strictly slave farm labor.
An orphan is a child whose parents have died, are unknown or have permanently abandoned them. It can also refer to a child who has lost only one parent, as the Hebrew translation, for example, is "fatherless".
Hetty Feather is a book by English author Jacqueline Wilson. It is about a young red-haired girl who was left by her mother at the Foundling Hospital as a baby and follows her story as she lives in a foster home before returning to the Foundling Hospital as a curious and bad-tempered five-year-old. There are more books to the "series" of Hetty Feather, which are recommended for ages 9–11 according to the author. CBBC created a TV series based on the book, with Isabel Clifton portraying Hetty. The programme was first aired in 2015. In the United States BYUtv has the US broadcast rights and began airing it in March 2018.
Lady Arabella Fitzmaurice Denny (1707–1792) was an Irish philanthropist, and founder of the Magdalen Asylum for Protestant Girls in Leeson Street, Dublin in 1765.
Angelo F. Coniglio is an American civil engineer, educator, genealogist and author. He was in the first graduating class (BSCE,1961) of the School of Civil Engineering established by Robert L. Ketter at the University of Buffalo (UB) in 1956. He attended a post-graduate semester at the University of Illinois where he was a student of renowned hydrology theorist Ven Te Chow. He also earned a master's degree from UB.
Gaetano Cipolla is a retired professor of Italian and Chairman of the Department of Modern Foreign Languages at St. John's University in New York City. He was born and raised in Francavilla di Sicilia in Messina Province, Sicily and emigrated to the US in 1955. He received his Bachelor of Science (1961) from New York University, Master of Arts (1969) from Hunter College (CUNY), and the PhD (1974) from New York University. He joined the faculty of St. John's University in 1974 and retired in 2011.
Carusu is the Sicilian word for "boy" and is derived from the Latin carus which means "dear" In the mid-1800s through the early 1900s in Sicily, carusu was used to denote a "mine-boy", a labourer in a sulfur, salt or potash mine who worked next to a picuneri or pick-man, and carried raw ore from deep in the mine to the surface. As with other mining industries, the use of carusi declined as mines switched to other, more efficient methods of transporting minerals to the surface, and the use of children is said to have ended by the 1920s or 1930s, but teenagers were still employed to carry ore to the surface as late as the 1950s.
Alessio di Giovanni was an Italian poet, novelist, and playwright. Much of his work is in Sicilian.
La Casa de Beneficencia y Maternidad de La Habana, was for 270 years Havana's repository of Havana's unwanted children. The House of Charity started during a time when Cuba was experiencing extreme poverty, unemployment, and corruption in the government. Corrupt leaders were plundering the public treasury and little attention was given to social assistance, health, education, or the protection of the poor: "los desamparados".
The Infants' Home Child and Family Services was established in Sydney, Australia in 1874 as a refuge for unwed mothers and their babies and evolving over time to a current provider of early childhood education and health services.
Sulfur was one of Sicily's most important mineral resources, which is no longer exploited. The area covered by the large deposits is the central area of the island and lies between the provinces of Caltanissetta, Enna and Agrigento: The area is also known to geologists as the chalky-sulfur plateau. But the area of mining exploitation also extended as far as the Province of Palermo with the Lercara Friddi basin and the Province of Catania, of which a part of the Province of Enna was part until 1928; it is the one in which sulfur mining, processing and transport took place in the last quarter of the millennium. For a time it also represented the maximum production area worldwide.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)