ABSTRACT
The Bay Area's Italian cemetery lies in the city of Colma, a funeral town on the outskirts of San Francisco. A Duomo of sorts dominates the summit of the necropolis. The cult heroes of local Italians also demonstrated this same ambivalence. Simultaneously, and with little sense of any inherent conflict, local Italians enshrined both Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi as an emblem of strict ethnic loyalty, and an Americanized version of Christopher Columbus as a typically American pioneer. The origins of San Francisco's Italian colony have been recounted elsewhere and, for the purposes of this analysis of change and continuity in an American city. Garibaldi, the leader and catalyst of Italy's armed struggle for unification, had traditionally furnished an attractive rallying point for the city's entire colony, Republicans and Loyalists. Garibaldi's counterpoise in the Italian colonial mind in San Francisco was Christopher Columbus, the proverbial discoverer of the American continent who reflected the ambivalent sentiments of San Francisco's transplanted Italians.
