Southern Italians dark skin?

Are many people in southern italy still dark skinned? Obviously I'm not talking about all southern Italians because there are light skinned people in southern italy as well. Back in the day it seems there were many more dark skinned Italians(such as myself)than today. And I was looking at some of my grandmothers pictures of people in her family picking up relatives from Ellis island(she got them processed in color somehow)and many of the Italians were dark skinned. They could've easily been mistaken for someone of middle eastern, Indian or black ancestry. I know I have been before and many people in my family as well. Obviously there was a high percentage of people from Sicily with dark skin, black hair, brown eyes and just a dark complexion in general, but what other southern italian regions had people of dark complexion? I used to have some southern italian American friends who were pretty fair skinned. Most of the people in my family if not all have a dark complexion though.

As people starting to immigrant to the US and discovered Blondes Botox and Fake Boobies they were falling for blondes like Ace in Casino.

Hahahahahaha that's the funniest thing I've heard all day. Yeah I guess that would be a pretty good reason as to why you don't see as many dark skinned Italians as you used to in America and probably in Italy as well.

well revis what you have to understand is there is a defference between Italians and SUPER italians, the way they eat, the way they talk, dress, look, and act, its all different....its a culture thing really. and don't let Carmela tell you anything different, she's really Albanian ya know

Most of my people are Napolitani. One of my grandfathers was Abruzzese. I don't recall any of them being that dark except for my cousin Carmela who was as dark as the darkest black person you ever met, especially in the summer. My parents and siblings are relatively light skinned. In fact, my dad had red hair.

^Yeah not all southern Italians are dark skinned but there are many who are. Or at least were.

Super Italians? Please elaborate I would like the hear more . Also, what part of NJ are you from? I'm from Jersey City originally.

probably has to do with the moors traveling to sicily way back when

Who were the moors? Is that short for Mormon?

Thats funny, my sisters brother is from jersey city. I know this off topic but do you by any chance happen to know the true amount of money tony salerno was really worth....any way we can get to the bottom of that?

African invaders

My nephew is 100% Sicilian and has blond hair and bule eyes, His father had dark skin and black hair.

Anyone that thinks, or says, that there are no fair skinned sicilians with light hair and eyes, has never been to Sicily.

David Caruso is of Sicilian descent.

No doubt there are fair skinned people in Sicily.

I asked that before. I asked for an estimation. No need to mock me. So I'm going to assume that you're really not from jersey in the first place.

That's why I said "many" people. I didn't want to give the impression that all southern italians were dark skinned or anything like that.

Carmela is spot-on. Are blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin the norm in Southern Italy and Sicily? No, but they're not that uncommon, either.


But Caruso isn't the best example. A very close friend of mine grew up with him in Forest Hills. Caruso's Mom was straight off the boat Irish, and he clearly took after that side of his family.

I agree they're not that uncommon at all. Especially nowadays it seems.

I don't understand why you say, "Are many people in southern italy STILL dark skinned?" and what do you mean by "especially nowadays"? What is it you think happened over recent years exactly? lol
I have to say your preoccupation with skin color of people in southern italy and sicily is curious, as you've made almost this same exact thread before. What exactly is it you're getting at?

When have I made a similar thread to this? And I say "STILL" because I see more and more people saying southern Italians aren't that dark, when I was growing up we were. That's why I say "nowadays". Like I said, not EVERYONE, but many southern Italians that I knew; had a dark complexion.

I think you might be thinking of a thread I commented on a long time ago. The neapolitan mobsters vs sicilian mobster thread that was made by someone else. I never made a thread similar to this that I can think of tbh.

If you ask me though, I'm happy more people today are identifying themselves as Americans more than anything. Being Italian is great, but this the greatest country on the planet idc what anybody says I'm proud to be an American over anything else.

@mikeyO

north africans from morocco.....they had red hair too

http://www.gangsterbb.net/threads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=757968&page=1

Ehhh I guess they could be similar in a way but they're far from the same thread. All I wanted was to see other people's input.

And I did. So thank you to everyone who has given their input so far.

Wouldn't Italy have been one of the prime (if not the prime) port and mercantile trade destinations back in the days of yore whens ships were the only means of transport?

Probably a contributing factor.

Italy and particularly Sicily has been invaded numerous times. Certainly the Carthaginians were invaders and maybe even the Etruscans before them. Who knows whose bloodlines flow through Siciliani veins.

People from Italy have different skin types/complexions and this includes the Southern parts as well. They do not all have olive/tan skin because of the sun and dark hair.

I am Latino and it is like this with people from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Argentina, Brasil, and other Latin American countries. It is also this way with people from Spain.

With all due respect to your heritage....Spain and "Latin America" are poor examples for comparison.

For one, Latin America is obviously VERY racially mixed as Spanish, Indigenous people, and Africans have been mixing for going on 500 years now. I don't think bloodlines/ethnic groups/racial groups have ever mixed as much as what occurred in the countries you mentioned for those centuries. African Americans are very influential culturally on a global scale so people tend to forget that during the transatlantic slave trade 90% of the Africans ended up in "Latin America".

Second, Spain was controlled for centuries by northern Africans...and that forever changed the gene pool for large percentage of Spaniards.

In fact in Spain...and then later in her territories in Western Hemisphere.....there was so much "race" mixing that there developed stringent classifications for people based on what "race" your parents were (and their parents)...
in Latin America there are Casta paintings that illustrate these distinctions....and it was a social pecking order...


In short...there are different "looks" of people in Latin America and wider range for different reasons than for Italy.

The majority of black African slaves wound up in Brasil, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic/Haiti, Colombia, and Cuba.

The majority of Mexicans do not have black African heritage; but some do in some areas. A lot of Mexicans and people from central and South America are of Indigenous and Spanish descent, or Spanish and descendant from other European countries. The Spanish and Portuguese who are of Moorish descent are Caucasians as the Berbers and moors from North Africa are Caucasian.

Yes there are different terms used in Latin American countries for someone's heritage.

This sounds like the whole "one drop" racist racial-purity BS with regards to Italian heritage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

All that means is that he took after his mother or there was a recessive gene in his past for fair complexion and blue eyes, and that he possibly has French or Norman heritage and not Italian, Iberian, or Greek heritage.

Why do some people insist Sicilians are part black or are black-African descent?

It seems to me like this this is quite a phenomena amongst Afrocentric and some Noridicist circles. Both insist a lot of "Sicilian"features such as curly hair, a darker pigmentation, and oddly once a more convex nose is solely attributable to Sub Saharan admixture. Whereas, genetics disprove this argument by showing that depending on which part of the Island one is from Sicilians are an amalgam of Phoenician, Italic, Iberian, Norman, and a significant amongst of Neolithic West Asian. And yet this racist myth that Sicilians are "black" or "African" is still perpetuated both among mainland Italians and an American myth created by the media and during slavery/segregationist times in the United States.

Stupidity, that's why.

Sicilians are mostly ancient Greek, genetically. Anything else (Phoenician, Norman, Iberian, and Moorish) is common more or less in one area or another in smaller amounts, and sub-saharan-African is almost nonexistent.

It's surprising to a lot of Americans but in Mexico there are a lot of people who have a light complexion, blue eyes, and blond hair. Also many Americans are surprised that people from Spain look nothing like people from Mexico and Latin American countries.

Listen..are we going to discuss issues or am I going to have to read freshly googled information whenever you respond?

Again, in this hemisphere...the English, Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese were the colonial powers.

over 90% of the enslaved Africans during the transatlantic slave trade ended up in Spanish or Portuguese claimed territories. Brasil is often classified as a latin american country.

There are descendants of the enslaved Africans in EVERY country in Latin America with some countries clearly having higher concentrations of Negro blood in the gene pool.

Your defensiveness about things that are facts highlight the residual effect of the casta system and it's prejudice.

The social system in Spain, if I had to bet money, probably places a premium on those Spaniards who do NOT have Moorish blood/heritage...so I doubt that the social hierarchy doesn't see a difference between pure Spaniard and in your words,descendants of moorish caucasians.

By American standards (and by most European/North African standards as well I would guess) these people are "Black". They are also indigenous North Africans (Berber/Tuareg/Sahrawis). Black/White is a social category much more than a biological one. Not every Berber or North African is Caucasian. Some ethnic/linguistic/religious/national groups do not precisely match up with "race".

Tinariwen (Tuareg musicians from Mali)




Doueh (Sahrawi musician from Western Sahara)


Mahmoud Guinia (Gnawa musician from Morocco)

That Canadian kid Justin Berber is White. I don't care what you say .

I thought he got deported..

Can you imagine bothering the President of the United States with this shit?

@Lilo and GetThesenets:I don't care what the American public thinks about race. Many Americans are surprised to learn that people from Afghanistan are not Arabic but are Caucasian. That Spanish people from Spain look completely different than people in Latin America do, and that yes you can be African and Caucasian. But then again the American public thinks that Sicilian people are "black" or part "African", and that if you are from Mexico you're of Native Mexican Indian descent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_people


100's of years ago people cared if someone was of Moorish descent in Spain but it's not like that now. Even in Mexico someone's ancestors do not matter as someone's social class has everything to do with how much money they have or appear to have.

In regards to Spain, there are some Spanish people who still think that Castilian Spanish is the only correct way to speak and pronounce Spanish and that Spanish that is used in the rest of the world is not really Spanish or it's incorrect; but they did not like the dialects of Catalan people, Galician people, or Basque people in Spain either. Not that many Spanish people today think this and if they still do they are in the vast minority; but when I was growing up decades ago you still did have Spanish people who thought this about Castilian Spanish but this was when Franco was still in power in Spain.

Yeah, money talks and bullshit walks .

Masculine , beloved national hero of DR, filthy rich..and....

........ Self-hating.

He's Dominican. Not Spanish or Mexican. Either way he is an adult it's his body and appearance, and he can do whatever he wants.

It's like how Mike Tyson now has a tribal face tattoo, or how Michael Jackson bleached his skin and had tons of plastic surgery done. I personally do not want to do this (get any type of plastic/cosmetic surgery or tattoos) but it's their appearance or body, and it was their choice to do this.

These people are all examples of people who have so much money they do not know what to do with it so they spend it on cosmetic surgery, tattoos, etc.

My Great Aunt was Sicilian and she was dark, she came over around 1905ish time frame.

I've noticed here in the South the whites seem to be darker than up North. I guess maybe it was from the farming culture here where everyone was always outside compared to factory workers up North??

Farmer tans dont count, Gomer ..

Relax, Dix. You know I love ya .

true but I was going to write...a product of his environment and era in which he lived


Hear me out...because on surface level(pun) it may sound like I'm making excuses for a grown man.

With your username,Piazza, I take it that you are a baseball fan and have seen several Dominican baseball players.

What if I told you that LEGALLY during an era of the 20th century that there were NO Black Dominicans? No ,your eyes weren't playing tricks on you....Big Papi ,Vlad Guerrero, Rafeal Soriano...or even Rafeal Santana from that magical Mets team do look like what you think they look like but.......

The govt. of DR legally had NO Black Dominicans. There were national ID cards issued for citizens. and the 3 racial categories were white, meztizo and indio or indian.

Schools taught that the darker Dominicans were descended from the indigenous natives of the island.

Africans were erased from the history and racial categorization of the state.


If I'm not mistaken, Sosa was born under this state sponsored nonsense.


The nonsense thought and TAUGHT about race ,skin color and hair texture in Latin America is a result of the casta system put in place hundreds of years ago in Spanish colonies. Closer to white..the higher you are social ladder. Black is at the bottom and there are gradations of status/stature based on heritage and phenotype.

Cornuto trying to imply that the Moors were not Black or even dark, Sosa bleaching his skin to fit into old money D.R. society, and hundreds of examples I've seen in real life(including examples from Spain and Mexico) are just part of much bigger issues.

I don't blame Cornuto anymore than I blame Sosa

For sure, I've met several people who are from these cultures who DON'T subscribe to this nonsense, but they are swimming against the current.

My "self-hating" post was a deliberate overstatement, Gets .

I mean, really, how far removed is this from White people laying in a tanning bed or living at the beach in the summer to get darker (which I myself have been "guilty" of), or from Black folks straightening their hair back in the '50s and '60s?

I think it's human nature to not be a hundred percent comfortable in your own skin.

@ pizza


Indeed, but there is a big difference between a bleach blonde White woman and a Black woman wearing wig weave etc that looks absolutely nothing like what her natural hair texture looks like.

I used the Sosa example to refute Cornuto's point about money trumping heritage. Here's a man with as much money as all but maybe a handful of old money families in his country , but who feels that his heritage/appearance puts him at a social disadvantage....and who bleaches his skin to fit into high society.

@pizzaboy


not being 100% comfortable in your own skin and bleaching your skin are two diff things

sammy sosa is probably damn near insane.....maybe it's from the roids

I took no offense.

Hey when I was still on a line crew back in the day you would have thought I was from somewhere other than the South because I was so dark until I took my shirt off.....haha

I know. You're a good sport .

Yeah I've seen some extremely dark Italians in my day and some very pale Italians in my day. Some Italians who looked black, middle eastern or Indian and some who looked Irish or German.They come in all shapes, sizes and colors really which is great. I always used to think it was funny how many Italians back in the day were so ignorant to discriminate against black people when Italians were called the N word in the south when they first came over in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some of them were hung in the south. I just never saw how people could hate because of someone else's background when in the end I'm sure our ancestors all came from the same piece of land anyway at the beginning of hunan time.

I knew one Dark Italian his nick name was Blackie.

When my mother came back from Florida from vacation she looked black. Her family was from Naples.

Lmao at that blackie joke. Blackie Napoli! Idk why they called him blackie though

Does anyone think that native americans and Italians look alike?

I've seen some that look like native Americans sure.

You guys are as FF would say "DUMMIESS DUMMY DUMMIES!!!""""

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Remember the movie imitation of life?

When I met my wife in a night club I had a dark tan and I had Curley hair. She taught I was Puerto Rican

That is disgusting.

Lots of black celebrities trying to look white these days by lightening their skin.

@revis island

Iron Eyes Cody the crying Indian was actually an Italian.

Nah, Sammy and the American celebs who do that are exceptions and they get routinely laughed at/criticized for doing it.


What you will see are retouched photos of Black celebs in mainstream magazines or ads....making them appear lighter..I guess to better appeal to mainstream audience.

Sort of a weird dance that non wasp American celebs have played for decades and think they need to play today

anglicize your name.
convert to Protestant Christian denomination,
have plastic surgery to erase your culturally or ethnically distinct traits,
marry a germanic woman and produce kids with less ethnic features

Yeah. You're probably right.

I have suspicions that a lot of Irish Americans in the South convert to Protestant denominations in a bid to assimilate with the bigots.

Irish faced lot of discrimination when they arrived in waves over here.
Ugly stereotyping, physical violence, "catholics" not being considered real christians by mainstream,etc,etc

just about every large wave of immigrants went through similar experiences ..and then turned around and had a hand in doing it to the next group


Irish Catholics passing or people passing as anything other than what they are......george stone aka guisseppe petri or fair skinned Blacks passing as white....part of the just part of the American story......some hide who they are...but most just fight against the bigotry and press forward

So true. Do unto others what was done unto you .

One of the most interesting parts of the film Goodfellas was some dialogue by Tommy

In first scene he's begging Henry to double date with him and lamenting that "The jew -broad is prejudiced against Italians.Can you believe in this day and age?"


In the other scene he's scolding his girlfriend for admiring Sammy Davis Jr's talent and seeing why his white wife is with him "You don't approve of that type of thing, do you?"


Thought it was interesting screenwriting.

It makes me uncomfortable to admit it, Gets. Because, well, you're Black and I'm White. But it was realistic dialogue for the time frame that the movie was set in. You hope with each generation that we become more tolerant, but it's not realistic to think that things will ever completely change. That said, I think we've come a long way since 1965.

And I'm not even talking about equal rights. I'm talking about living with each other. My father's almost 85. He didn't have any Black friends when he was growing up. I'm 54, and to be honest, I didn't have more than two or three myself (although one of my very best friends is Black). I grew up in a very segregated neighborhood. That's just how things were. But my kids (19, 24 and 27) probably have as many Black friends as they do White. I think that's progress, where some so called White liberals will tell you that it's not enough.

re Jews and Italians and "Goodfellas." Jews and Italians, here in New York City anyway, are very much alike. As for what goes on in Tel Aviv and Rome, you'd have to ask them. But here in New York, Jews and Italians always seem to find each other .

pizza,

agree with you about it being realistic....thought it was interesting that Tommy is a more complex character than what someone viewing film for the first time might notice. Thought it was very honest to have both of those scenes in the film to illustrate the point we talked about...doing unto others.
Nothing uncomfortable about the film or the scenes. film about killers and gangsters .. slurs about italians, irish and blacks are going to be heard...though it rings false that no jewish slur was uttered..not even in scene where maury is killed.....
hollywood's rules

But "Casino" was loaded with Jewish slurs. In the third act of that film, Joe Pesci repeatedly referred to DeNiro as "the little Jew." And not in a nice way. Now I realize it's a different film. But the actors and director were the same.

pizza,

absolutely....was just saying that it didn't ring true in Goodfellas.
Even though Maury uses italian and irish slurs in the film and the entire group of associates throw friendly slurs and jabs at each other, just found it odd that no slurs were used against jews.

I thought otherwise it was pretty honest dialogue. Even the good looking , relatively "good" gangster, Henry is shown using slurs. The guy we are supposed to root for in films are generally completely sanitized and I'm glad that Scorcese didn't do that with Henry....though of course Henry being the protagonist....he is cleaned up a great deal from what the real Henry Hill was...glad Scorcese didn't punk out on that detail.

The real Henry Hill was such a bottom feeding lowlife that had Scorsese portrayed him realistically people would have walked out of the movie before Henry broke his cherry .

I am half italian and half Hungarian. Daddio was a hungarian Jew even though he beat me like a dog. If anyone said anything about that piece of shit I would attack them.

When I was a kid everyone was prejudiced. My mother was prejudiced. My older brother met a pretty puerto Rican girl. She asked for his number to make sure he did not give her a fake name.

I was in the house when she called my brother was in the bathroom. Ma picked up the phone when she heard the girls Spanish accent she said no one by that name lives here and don't call again.

Everyone can't live in Disney land I guess.

Sicilians are a diverse bunch. I've met black curly haired Sicilians with almost Indian-like dark skin, blond- or ginger-haired fair skinned Sicilians, brown-haired olive skinned Sicilians,...or any mixture between this. The list could go on and on.
Calabrians I've met in general tend to have a more predisposed look: dark haired, olive skinned. But again, differences exist.

I have been told by people who are Sicilian or who have a Sicilian heritage that I look Sicilian. But I have dark hair, dark eyes, and I do not have a pale complexion and if I tan or get sun then my complexion does turn darker. I did not really know what my Italian heritage was as I was told it could be Neapolitian, or even Sicilian. I looked up my Italian heritage and it was Calabrian. But I also am told by people who are Hispanic that I look like someone from Spain or who has a Spanish heritage. I did go to certain parts of Spain as a teenager on a vacation trip, and I agree with this as people in certain cities thought I was a native.

it's called rap music or what's perceived to be rap music in todays day in age

Then there's the Black Irish who have dark hair and tan complexions which they favor more the Spanish or Southern Italians. The Black Irish have Spanish blood in them anyway going back to the Spanish Armada when survivors of the ship come upon on the shores of Ireland, and intermarried with the Irish then that's how black Irish came along.

This is when we lived in Italian Harlem early 60s. That's Jefferson park right next to Rao's.

They guy getting beat up was in the French connection played the candy store owners brother. The garbage man that bought the car to slip the heroin into.

The black kid with us is Johnny Bell. He grew up with us. He fought with us against other gangs. Hell, Johnny even spoke Italian pretty good American football player as well.

So if we knew you there was no prejudice.
Check out this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNv5It7VeEc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Lol that's true! I remember that from the sopranos.