When the greatest living historian of our time, Robert Orsi, started researching Italian Harlem and unearthing the documents that allowed him to study the meanings and importance of the festa of the Madonna of Mount Carmel between the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, one of the things he discovered was that the life that those poor, mostly southern Italians lived was centered on the notions of home and rispetto.

Home gave a meaning to their life. It was their moral center, as well as the locus of a private matriarchy, which in a way was also the flip side of the patriarchy that ruled the street, the public space. Rispetto was their key social value.