Throughout its history, Sicily has been the cross road for armies from Europe and Africa wanting to control shipping lanes in the Mediterranean. Normans, Romans, Greeks, Moors, and Spaniards have had their turn. On the southeastern coast is Syracuse, which became the Sicilian capital of the Roman Empire. Even the Italians from the northern provinces came to conquer Sicily.

On the north side of the island, toward the western end, just east of Palermo is the village of Termini Imerese. Fishing has been a major industry for the citizens of the town. Other trades, such as farming and bricklaying also employed people.

The year before sixteen-year-old George Washington was hired as county surveyor in Culpeper, Williamsburg, Virginia, Vincenzo Bova was born in Termini Imerese on the north coast of Sicily. We don't know whom he married or how he made his living. The only information about him comes from his grandson's marriage documents ¹. Vincenzo's son, Leonardo, was born about 1768 and worked as a porter. Leonardo's bride was Anna Catalano. The naming tradition of Italian families is to name the first born son for the child's grandfather. So in 1794 Leonardo and Anna named their son Vincenzo¹. As he grew up in Termini, he became a porter like his father.

When he became twenty-six years of age, Vincenzo married fifteen-year-old Santa Re¹ on May 23, 1820. She was the daughter of Antonino Re and Guiseppa Pizzuto¹. Their first child, Leonardo, died on November 23, 1822. Of the other four children that have been discovered, their eldest child, Leonardo ², was born in Termini on November 3, 1828. Vincenzo and Santa had at least three other children³: Anna, born in Termini in 1831, Guiseppa, born in Alia in 1833, and Antonino, born in Termini in 1836.

Picture of Alia by Joseph K. Bova, 2003

Salvadore Vincenzo Bova grew up in Alia. His father, Leonardo, had become a master bricklayer² before his birth. As he grew up, Vincent followed in his father's trade. Vincenzo married ⁶ Salvadora Bellina in Alia when he was twenty-five. She was nineteen years old. Her parents⁶ were Rosolino Bellina and Francesca Cimo. We know that Vincenzo and Salvadora had at least five children in Alia: Leonardo, Rosolino, Anna, Salvatore and Francesca.

But what was it that caused so many people to leave their homeland to seek a new life? The conditions prevalent in Sicily in the later half of the nineteenth century have been described as follows:

            "The decades following 1860 witnessed Sicily's slow economic decline as 
             important new industries gradually emerged not in the South but in the
             North.  Some of this was economic happenstance, but much was the result
             of punitive taxation and other national economic policies detrimental to
             the South. Until the 1860s, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (i.e., Naples
             and Sicily) was clearly the largest, wealthiest and most industrialized
             of the various italian states.
  
             While Italian immigration prior to about 1870 had been primarily from 
             the poorer northern regions, henceforth it was to be from the increasingly
             poorer South. Between 1890 and 1930, millions of southerners left 
             for the Americas. 7"