Passenger Ship Arrival List for SS Conte Grande

Pasquale Taraffo, like many who came through America’s gates, was only visiting. He was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1887. Pasquale learned to play the guitar as a child and began giving concerts at the age of nine, eventually switching from the traditional guitar to the harp guitar—an enormous 14-stringed instrument mounted on a pedestal. By the early 20th century he was touring Italy, and in 1910, he made the first of several successful concert tours abroad. Taraffo’s tours, especially of South America, were wildly popular, and he was critically acclaimed as “the Paganini of the guitar”—a reference to the legendary Italian violinist. A handbill for his 1926 concert in Correggio, Italy, along with photo-postcards of him with his harp guitar, were found in an Immigration Bureau file that dates from the late 1920s. The file, which also contains passports, birth certificates, marriage licenses, and baptismal certificates for a variety of individuals, appears to be a dead letter file holding documents that have no accompanying communication or that could not be returned to the owner. Taraffo came to the United States three times—for a concert tour of New York City and California in 1928–29, as a member of a ship’s crew in 1933, and for a brief concert stop in New York in 1935. As a person applying for a visa based on his artistic abilities, he had to submit evidence of his exceptional talent. It may be that these documents became separated from others in his file.