Every Sicilian family has one. The person everybody goes to: to settle the argument, to bless the marriage, to carve on Sunday and to say what happens next. Nobody elected them and no paper named them. The family simply called them Don or Donna, and everyone, from the grandchildren to the parish priest, knew exactly who was meant.
The head of the table
In the old Sicilian house the table was where the family happened. Sunday lunch began after Mass and ran into the evening: the sauce on the stove since morning, the bread broken by hand, the children sent out and called back in. Somebody sat at the head of it. They poured the wine, they decided when the plates went round again, and when there was news, a baby, a wedding, a quarrel to be finished, it was told to them first. That seat was earned over a lifetime, and it was the most respected place in the house.
Compare and comare
The family was never only blood. At a christening the child was given a padrino and a madrina, its godparents, and the parents and godparents became compare and comare to one another for life. In Sicily the bond was called the comparatico di San Giovanni, after Saint John the Baptist, and it was taken as seriously as kinship: a compare was family at every table, at every feast and at every hard moment that followed. Families were built that way, outward, one baptism at a time.
The table of Saint Joseph
On the nineteenth of March, Sicilian families still lay la tavola di San Giuseppe, an altar of breads baked into shapes, fennel, fava beans, oranges and sweets, set out in a front room and shared with neighbours and with anyone in need. The custom is old, kept as thanks for a famine ended long ago, and it crossed the ocean intact. You will find Saint Joseph's tables today in Brooklyn and in New Orleans, laid by great grandchildren who have never seen Sicily and would not think of skipping the year.
Across the ocean
Between 1880 and 1920 around four million Italians came to the United States, most of them from the south and a great many from Sicily. They settled street by street, often village by village: on Elizabeth Street and Mulberry Street in Manhattan, in Boston's North End, on the Hill in St Louis, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. They brought the feast days, the Sunday table, the godparents and the respect for the head of the family, and they kept them through every move to the suburbs that came after. For millions of families today, that is what Sicily means: not a place on a map, but a way of sitting down together.
The rose
Our seal carries a rose because the rose is at every one of those moments. In the bride's hands, on the christening table, at the head of the Sunday table on a birthday, and on the family graves in November, when Sicilian children are still told that the dead bring them presents. Around it runs the family motto, in the plainest words we know: La famiglia è tutto, oggi e sempre. Family is everything, today and always.
The title the family gives
That is the tradition our certificates draw on. Don was never something a state conferred; it was what the people around you chose to call you, for the respect you had earned at their table. A La Famiglia di Sicilia certificate sets a title of the family before a name, under the family rose: Soldato for a first seat at the table, Capo for a place further up it, and Don for the head of it. Give it to the one who already holds the head of the table, or take a seat yourself.