In 1891 a transatlantic steamship departed Italy, headed for New York City. It never arrived. The S.S. Utopia, carrying 880 passengers, many of them Italian immigrants who had boarded in Naples and Palermo, was sailing through the port of Gibraltar when it struck another vessel. The hole created by the collision sank the Utopia in just twenty minutes, and 562 people died.

Fortunately for our story, the DiMaria family, citrus farmers from the inland town of Poggioreale, in Sicily, were not on this voyage. They had boarded the Utopia, bound for New Orleans, three years earlier, part of a wave of Italian immigrants fleeing poverty and political unrest (the exodus from Poggioreale alone was so large that the town’s church ceased holding a weekly mass).