Glasgow’s Italians came in chains — migration chains: from the 1880s young men from two small regions above all, the hills around Barga in Tuscany and the Frosinone country south of Rome, followed brothers and cousins to Scotland, hawked and saved, and opened shops. What they built became a Glasgow institution: the café — the ‘tally’s’ in the affectionate slang — and its siblings the fish-and-chip shop and the ice-cream parlour, hundreds strong across the city by the 1930s, open late, family-run, marble-countered, and serving every neighbourhood in Glasgow its hot peas, its ninety-nines and its winter chips.
The cafés’ social role was larger than their menus: warm, bright and unlicensed, they were where courting couples, families and teenagers could gather outside the pub’s orbit — the temperance movement’s unintended allies — and their proprietors’ names (Coia, Crolla, Nardini down the coast, the University Café’s Verrecchia family and a hundred more) became neighbourhood landmarks that outlived the neighbourhoods. By the 1930s the community numbered several thousand, with its societies, its Casa d’Italia in Park Circus, and a settled place in the city’s affections.
Then, in one night, the city’s neighbours became the state’s enemies. When Italy declared war on 10 June 1940, anti-Italian riots smashed café windows across Scotland, and internment swept up the community’s men wholesale — fathers and sons who had lived in Glasgow for decades lifted from behind their own counters. The catastrophe followed on 2 July 1940: the Arandora Star, deporting internees to Canada, was torpedoed off Ireland with the loss of over eight hundred lives, more than four hundred of them Italian internees — among them dozens of men from Scotland’s café families. Glasgow households lost fathers, brothers and sons to a British ship, in British custody; the wound, little spoken of for decades, is the community’s defining grief.
The community’s answer, characteristically, was to reopen the shop. The post-war decades rebuilt and diversified — cafés into restaurants, chippies handed down or sold on, grandchildren into the professions and the arts: Glasgow-Italian names run through Scottish law, medicine, football and culture, from Armando Iannucci’s comedy to Daniela Nardini’s acting, and the fish tea and the double nougat remain civic heritage. In 2011 the community’s long silence about 1940 was given a place to stand: the Italian cloister garden at St Andrew’s Cathedral on the Clyde, whose memorial names the Arandora Star’s Scottish-Italian dead beside the river their families served.
Third- and fourth-generation now, Glasgow’s Italians are simply Glaswegians with better coffee and a graver history than their neighbours guess — the smallest of the city’s great migrations by numbers, and pound for pound perhaps the most beloved.