Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

1
Background, Early Life
and Education
Now, you asked me about the background
of my parents and their activities. Julia, my
mother, and John, my father, were both born
in Italy near a town called Leghorn, which
is also known in Italian as Livorgno. They
were born inland from the sea about oh,
maybe ten, fifteen miles—it’s also near Masa
Carrara, which is the place where all the
beautiful Italian marble is mined. John, my
father, grew up in a typical Italian family. They
were landowners, and they had outlying little
fields that people worked and so on. They also
had their own land that they worked—you
might call them sharecroppers—and they
contributed to whatever was grown, and they
paid a rental for Fthe land, and when they
sold the crops, why they paid their rental,
and whatever they made over, that’s what
they kept.
Dad grew up and was educated in Italy,
and his formal education would probably
have been the equivalent to about two years
of college in the United States. And after he
was graduated from what we call high school,
he went into a seminary and was, in fact,
studying to become a priest, but after, oh,
about two years of it, he decided that was not
for him, and decided to come to the United
States. So, his parents sent him over to the
United States in care of a cousin who lived in
Sacramento. And at the time he came over he
went to work, in hotels—whatever work he
could get as a busboy—he graduated to—he
became a waiter actually, and he worked in
some of the resort hotels down on the coast
near Santa Cruz, Monterey. And during this
time in Sacramento when he’d make a little
money, he’d come up to Reno, and he used to
like to play. Of course, gaming was open in
Reno at the time—it was condoned and not
legalized. And as I told you before, the history
of how he acquired the Palace Club building—
or why he acquired it. Because he used to
come up here and play a little game of Faro
Bank. And as a young lad (he came over here
at the age of seventeen) he came up here one
time. He had saved four hundred dollars— he
took two hundred with him, and came up,
came into the Palace Club, the original Palace
Club, and played and lost his two hundred.