STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Before the boardwalk crowds and summer-day bustle came to define South Beach, its story was written by immigrants who carried little more than trade skills and a stubborn resolve to build the American dream with family at its center.
For Anne Navarria, 73, a resident of the Shore Acres section of South Beach, that history is not a distant chapter but a living inheritance, etched in the lives of her grandparents, Anna Macchia and Luigi Cassano.
More than a century after the couple emigrated from Puglia, Italy to New York, their descendants are preserving the story of how Italian immigrant families helped shape South Beach into a close-knit waterfront community rooted in hard work, entrepreneurship and multigenerational family traditions.
Family roots
Navarria’s grandmother, Anna, was born in 1887 in Toritto, a small town in Italy’s Puglia region…