I'm 50% Italian and 50% Irish on both sides (both my parents are 50/50), so you might say I'm 100% Italian and 100% Irish lol.

When my father's father (Calabrese Italian) first married my grandmother (Irish), all the neighborhood ladies were dressed in black and came to his mother expressing their sympathies, as if he had died rather than had gotten married--and this was in the early '50s. To the Italian ladies of the neighborhood, him marrying an Irish girl was equivalent to him dying; it was a massive shame.

On the other hand, all my grandmother's Irish friends referred to him as "The Black Phantom" due to his dark hair and dark complexion and the way he'd come and go.

On the other side, my mother's father (Neapolitan Italian) got married to my grandmother, his family hated it. All his brothers had married non-Italian girls and they were all equally disliked.

My Irish Great Grandfather told my grandmother that Italians were "inside out ni**ers", and if this was the old neighborhood, the neighborhood he grew up in, she'd been an outcast at best and beaten up at worst for being with an Italian. He refused to pay for her wedding because she married an Italian. This was the late 1940s.

Why was there such animosity and mutual contempt between Italians and Irish people?