L'Unione Italiana (The Italian Club) — Tampa, Florida

L'Unione Italiana, the Italian Club of Tampa, is a mutual aid society that Italian immigrants founded in Ybor City on April 4, 1894. Its clubhouse, a three-story Neoclassical building completed in 1918, stands at 1731 E. 7th Ave., across the street from the site of the first clubhouse, which burned in 1914. The Florida Division of Historical Resources marker states that the society's primary purpose was to promote social and fraternal exchange among its members and to provide medical benefits and burial expenses.

The Italian Club describes itself as a society that began with 127 members and grew into one of Tampa's major cultural institutions. Its records sit in the USF Libraries Tampa Bay Mutual Aid Society Collections, and the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The society answered the needs of a young immigrant colony. The state marker records that the nucleus of Tampa's Italian colony arrived from New Orleans and Sicily in 1887, drawn by the cigar factories of Ybor City. According to the Italian Club, those families needed access to medical care, financial assistance, education and a community that shared their language, and L'Unione Italiana was founded to meet those needs.

It was not Ybor City's first society, and its founders borrowed from the one that was. The club's history states that L'Unione Italiana became Tampa's second mutual aid society, following the founding of El Centro Espanol in 1891, and that eight Spanish immigrants who had helped establish that organization joined the Italians in creating the new club. Bartolomeo Filogamo was elected the first president; born in Sicily, he had reached New Orleans in 1885 and Tampa in 1889.

From the start the club paid out in hard times. The Italian Club lists assistance to members during illness and benefits to the families of deceased members among its first services. The state marker goes further, calling L'Unione Italiana the forerunner of more than 1,400 Italian mutual aid societies founded in the United States, and describing the health benefits of Ybor City's social clubs as early examples of cooperative medicine.

Medical benefits grew into a dedicated building. According to the Italian Club, members had access to a walk-in clinic and pharmacy, and in 1920 the club purchased a neighboring three-story brick building that served as a medical clinic for its members.

Burial was the other half of the promise. A separate state marker for Il Cimitero dell'Unione Italiana records that the society institutionalized the Italian funeral in Tampa when in 1896 it purchased cemetery land at 26th Street and 23rd Avenue from the prominent African-American Armwood family. The educator Blanche Armwood (1890 to 1939) is also buried there, and the grounds include a parcel belonging to the Societa de Mutuo Soccorso.

The marker describes the funeral itself as a public ritual. Hundreds of people walked in a cortege led by a brass band, often pausing in front of the deceased's house and at the Italian Club, where the flags of Italy and the United States flew at half mast. In the early years, each club member contributed one dollar to the bereaved family; later, L'Unione Italiana established a $300 survivor benefit. Ceramic photographs and Sicilian and Italian inscriptions on the grave markers recall the stonecutters' home island.

The club prepared immigrants for citizenship. The Italian Club reports that it offered classes in English, arithmetic and American government to help members prepare for naturalization, ran Italian-language schools for children, and provided space at no cost to the Tampa Public Library so that a branch library could serve the Ybor City community.

Public events tied the society to the rest of Tampa. In 1911 the Italian Club entered the Gasparilla parade with a carriage drawn by two white horses carrying the club's first queen, a tradition continued today by the Krewe of Italia. When President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed May 24, 1918, Italian Day during World War I, the club and its Ladies Auxiliary organized a parade of approximately 8,000 people from the new clubhouse through Ybor City and downtown Tampa. In World War II, the club reports, 265 members served in the armed forces and L'Unione Italiana purchased $62,600 in war bonds.

Club leadership also reached City Hall. Philip Licata, president for 17 consecutive years and leader of both building campaigns, served on the Tampa City Council, according to the club's history, and his son-in-law Nick Nuccio later served two nonconsecutive terms as mayor of Tampa.

The first Italian clubhouse was short-lived. The Italian Club records that the three-story building at 1724 East Seventh Avenue opened on October 11, 1912, with a three-day celebration, at a cost of approximately $60,000, when membership stood near 900. It was destroyed by fire in May 1914. The state marker places that first building on the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Eighteenth Street.

Construction of the replacement began in April 1917 under Licata. The club gives the completed cost in 1918 as an estimated $120,000; the state marker gives $80,000. Tampa architects Leo Elliott and B.C. Bonfoey designed it, and the marker says the structure embraces the Italo-Greco tradition embodied in the ancient Greek temples of the province of Agrigento, Sicily. A contract dated November 21, 1918, held by USF Libraries, records the agreement between L'Unione Italiana and the architects for the club building on 7th Avenue and 18th Street.

Inside, according to the club, the Ybor City building held a theater with a balcony, a ballroom, a cantina and dance floor, a library, classrooms, meeting rooms and space for medical services, and at various times billiard rooms, a gymnasium, steam rooms, handball courts and a bowling alley.

Membership climbed through the 1920s and peaked after a merger. The Italian Club reports approximately 1,800 members by 1924, and states that in 1934 the Sicilian Club of West Tampa merged with L'Unione Italiana, bringing the combined membership to more than 3,000. The club celebrated its centennial in 1994, one hundred years after the April 1894 founding in Ybor City.

Social life kept those members close. The club's history describes family picnics at DeSoto Park, including a 1912 outing that featured a four-mile race from the county courthouse in downtown Tampa to Palmetto Beach, and excursions by trolley, train and boat to Ballast Point, Pass-a-Grille and the Hillsborough River. On Saturday evenings two bands often played at once in the 7th Avenue clubhouse, one with traditional music in the upstairs ballroom and one with popular songs in the downstairs cantina. Paolo P. Longo, president in 1933, 1945 and again in 1949 and 1950, oversaw the West Tampa merger, and the club still presents an annual Paolo Longo Award for work preserving Italian heritage in Tampa.