By Alexander Rivero

Staff Writer

By the calendar year 2022, Giovanni Pinto—a retired Spanish, French, and Italian language teacher of 30 years now living in Riverdale—will have spent almost three times as many years living in New Jersey as he ever spent living in his native town of Pescopagano, a town in the province of Potenza, in the region of Basilicata, in the historic Italian south. That simple fact has not stopped Pinto from diving head-first into the preservation of his motherland’s culture here in the States, and he has done everything from run Italian organizations to Italian newspapers in and around northern New Jersey, the place he has called home for over fifty years. 

Pinto’s most recent endeavor have come in the form of his books. He has written two of them in recent years, the first called The Genius of Janus, which documents the Pescopaganese experience in the United States since the late nineteenth century. The other, The Prevedent Progeny, traces the Italian presence in America through its five generations since the arrival of the original pioneers. 

“The inspiration to sit down and write these books,” says Pinto, “is actually rooted in my time of running my newspaper, L’Italico, which I published for over 25 years. I was educated in Italy until the age of 16, and when I came here to New Jersey, I always had that instinct to participate in the community. And I thought a newspaper dedicated to Italian culture in America was a good way to do that.”

Pinto started his L’Italico with the hopes of looking for histories of different Italian communities in and around the New York City area, including those communities close to where he was living in East Orange. 

“You name it I went there,” says Pinto, “with a pen and notebook in hand, looking for people to talk to. Scotch Plains, Newark, Elizabeth, Paterson, Cliffside Park, North Bergen, the Oranges. Bergen County as well. The opportunities abounded for topics to write about.”

As he got to know more and more people, he recognized an opportunity for more in-depth assignments, those that would require deeper readings into history and background. 

“My research went all the way back to Italian immigration to the United States, dating from the 1870s, and I ended up writing quite a bit on the three major Italian groups in Newark, the Teorese, the Calabritani, and the Caposele.” 

To hear Pinto reminisce is almost to reminisce oneself about a time and place one never knew personally. He exudes the same passion and drive for detail and nuance that he did all those years ago, when he first sat down to a typewriter to write his historical reports and articles. It was precisely the passion he had for this kind of information, and the fear that it would all be lost if he failed to act, that moved him to sit back down and resume his work.

“When I stopped publishing after all these years, I had a sinking feeling that all this information would be lost,” he recalls, “and so I decided to write a book which essentially resumes the work I had done in my newspaper all those years ago, and reprints many of the original stories we published in its issues.” 

In The Genius of Janus, Pinto centers on the Pescopaganese community of East Orange that settled in the parish of St. Joseph on Tremont Avenue, and how that community took shape as the years passed. In particular, it zeroes in on the Pescopaganese Mutual Aid Society of East Orange and Surroundings, an aid society that the community formed in 1919, and to date has been around for over a century. Pinto was appointed president of this group as a 21-year-old, and was invited to serve as its chairman for the centennial celebration in 2019. 

The Prevedent Progeny, his most recent book, explores the ancestry of southern Italians in the United States, entering now their fifth generation of assimilation into the country since first arrival. The word “prevedent”, it turns out, is not an official word at all in the English language. Pinto argues that it should be, however.

“It is a perfect pronunciation of a Latin word composed of two roots—pre, which means ‘before’, and vedere, which means ‘to see.’ Our forefathers came from the most abused and forgotten towns of southern Italy, towns that turned dire especially after the unification of the country in the 1860s. They saw no improvement in their circumstances, and so they left—to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and of course the United States.” 

For more information on Giovanni Pinto and each of his books please visit his website, www.thegeniusofjanus.com.