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Madonna Louise Ciccone: The Abruzzese Roots of the Queen of Pop
Her grandparents left a mountain village in Abruzzo for a Pennsylvania steel town. Their granddaughter turned Catholic imagery and Italian swagger into the biggest career in pop, and picked a fight with the pope along the way. In the 1986 video for “Papa Don’t Preach,” Madonna wore a simple white T-shirt with three words across the chest: “Italians Do It Better.” It became one of the defining images of the decade, and one of the cheekiest statements of ethnic pride pop music has ever produced. The woman wearing it was born Madonna Louise Ciccone on Aug. 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan. She would go on to become the best-selling female recording artist of all time. But the story of that T-shirt starts more than 4,000 miles away, in a stone village in the mountains of central Italy. From Pacentro to Pennsylvania Pacentro sits high in the Apennines in the province of L’Aquila, in Abruzzo, inside what is now Majella National Park. Its population peaked at more than 4,000 in 1911. Today, after generations of emigration, it’s just under 1,100. Madonna’s grandfather, Gaetano Ciccone, was born there in 1901. In 1920 he left for Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, a steel town outside Pittsburgh. His wife, Michelina Di Iulio, followed in 1922. Even Gaetano’s parents eventually made the trip, emigrating in 1930 when they were 63 and 54. Gaetano and Michelina’s son, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone, became an engineer who worked for Chrysler’s defense division and later General Dynamics. He married Madonna Louise Fortin, an X-ray technician of French-Canadian descent. She died of breast cancer on Dec. 1, 1963, when her daughter and namesake was 5. A Catholic girl Madonna grew up in a Catholic household and attended St. Frederick’s and St. Andrew’s Catholic schools. In 1966 she took Veronica as her confirmation name. That upbringing became the richest material of her career: the rosaries, the crucifixes, the guilt and the theater of the church. It peaked with “Like a Prayer” in 1989. The video, with its stigmata, burning crosses and a dream sequence involving a saint, drew condemnation from the Vatican. Religious groups called for a boycott, and Pepsi pulled a commercial built around the song and dropped her as a sponsor. Madonna vs. the pope Italy had first embraced her in 1987, when her Who’s That Girl tour played Turin’s Stadio Comunale, broadcast live on RAI, and Florence’s Stadio Artemio Franchi. Footage from those shows became the concert film “Ciao Italia.” During the Turin stop, she met some of her Italian cousins. Three years later, the relationship turned stormy. Ahead of her Blond Ambition shows in Italy in 1990, Pope John Paul II urged fans to stay away, and the show was reportedly condemned as one of the most satanic in history. Madonna answered with a press conference at the Rome airport. The moment ended up in her documentary “Truth or Dare.” “I talk with my hands, I cry a lot, I’m passionate, I have a bad temper and I love beautiful shoes.” — Madonna, to Le Figaro, on being Italian The village that waits Madonna has never visited Pacentro, though her father has. Her relatives there, and the town’s mayor, have said she’s always welcome. When a powerful earthquake devastated L’Aquila and nearby towns in April 2009, killing hundreds, she pledged money toward relief, reportedly £500,000. She said she was “happy to lend a helping hand to the town that my ancestors are from.” She has kept coming back to Italy on tour, most recently with her Celebration tour in Milan in 2023. And she has never stopped playing with the identity she inherited, the passion and the pageantry and the Catholic imagery she turned into pop. Asked once by the French newspaper Le Figaro what was Italian about her, she rattled off a list: she talks with her hands, cries a lot, has a temper and loves beautiful shoes. It was a joke, mostly. But the girl from Bay City with the grandparents from Pacentro never needed a T-shirt to prove the point.