But the family's connection to Canada began a generation earlier.

Ontario’s father had also immigrated to Canada as a young man, arriving at 19 and settling in Port McNicoll. There, in a logging town on Georgian Bay, he opened a small general store and arranged for his future wife to join him from Italy. They married in Canada and raised their first three children there.

Illness and a fourth child, Ontario, on the way, forced the family to return to Italy, but they did so reluctantly.

“My dad was baptized as Ontario because that’s how much they didn’t want to leave,” Christina says. “And they thought it sounded Italian.”

The years that followed Ontario and Anna’s arrival in Canada were not always easy. Ontario had intended to finish his law degree, but like many newcomers in the postwar years, he did what was necessary. He worked construction, specializing in the delicate plaster corners and trims that were shaped by hand in older Toronto homes. 

“He was a perfectionist,” Christina says. “They would call him for the special work.”

But it was his voice that would ultimately define his path. Recruited to host a two-hour Italian-language radio program in the late 1950s, Ontario became a familiar presence in kitchens and living rooms across Toronto. 

“That program was listened to like a religion,” Anthony recalls. In a time before the internet, before easy long-distance calls, the broadcast became a lifeline — news, language, community. From radio came television. From television came something else: trust.

People began showing up at his door.

“They would come to him for everything,” Anthony says.

At first, it was small things. Help understanding a form. A question about bringing a relative over. Someone needing to send money back home. Others wanted tickets — passage to Italy to see parents, siblings, the villages they had left behind.

Ontario began arranging travel the same way he had approached radio: personally, attentively.

“It’s not only about selling tickets,” Anthony remembers him saying. “These people want to travel,’ he’d say. ‘They want experience. I want to take them all over the world.’”

And he did. Anthony and Christina eventually joined the family business, carrying forward not only the company, but the tone their father had set — service first, community always. Anthony’s son, Jason Sarracini, now represents a third generation. He entered the travel industry in a different era — one shaped by digital tools and global access — yet he remains rooted in the same understanding his grandfather lived by: that travel is personal.

Ontario and Anna were just two of the more than one million people who passed through Pier 21 between 1928, when it opened, and 1971, when it closed. Their story is one thread in a much larger tapestry of arrivals that shaped the country.

Today, those stories are preserved and shared at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax.

The building that welcomed newcomers still stands on Halifax’s waterfront, now home to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. From the outside, it is modest. Compared to the grand European ports many newcomers left behind, it did not look like much.

“We call it the shed,” says Carrie-Ann Smith, Vice-President of Audience Engagement at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

She has worked at the museum since 1998, before it even opened to the public, and has connected with countless people, all bearing their own stories of arrival. She says when former passengers return, they rarely talk about architecture.

“They all say it was very, very clean and that everyone was kind to them. Always. They remember the people.”

Inside the museum, floor-to-ceiling windows look out over the harbour. Georges Island sits directly ahead, and just beyond it, the narrow mouth where ships once appeared after seven to ten days at sea. Carrie-Ann says most visitors head straight for the windows. “They look out and try to imagine their ship coming in.”

The original wooden doors still stand. “I tell them, ‘This is exactly where you walked in,’” Carrie-Ann says.

Inside the museum, a two-storey wall installation, the Sobey Wall of Honour, contains the names of thousands of Canadians, including the Sarracinis, who began life in this country by walking through those doors.

In the Canadian Immigration Hall — which traces four centuries of immigration history — visitors linger over suitcases and handwritten tags, over stories of what was packed and what was left behind.

Carrie-Ann tells of a Lebanese family who carried a 30-pound kibbeh stone across the ocean — “literally a piece of Lebanon,” she says — because without it, they could not make the food that defined home.

A Dutch woman brought a favourite rock from the Netherlands, the one she used to weigh down the lid of a pot so it would not boil over.

A little boy smuggled his songbird, tending to it throughout the long voyage. He presented it at customs in a cage wrapped in brown paper. "The customs officer shakes it, and he hears the chirping and the flapping, and then he just pushes it back to the little boy and winks at him," Carrie-Ann says.

Others tucked photographs into coat linings, wrapped linens around fragile heirlooms, and many brought familiar foods from home: olive oils, cheeses, and cured meats. Food brought over from abroad was not permitted past customs.

"There's a pedway that connects Pier 21 proper to the Immigration Annex, and that's where they would do small baggage customs and ask you about anything that was in your carry-on," Carrie-Ann says. That's where a lot of the best stories reside.

One of Carrie-Ann's favourite stories is that of a 13-year-old, travelling alone, who was seasick throughout the entire voyage. He grew very hungry as he stood in the customs line and saw opportunity in all the meats and cheeses being removed from other passengers. So he ducked under the table to eat the bounty.

"He was brilliant," Carrie-Ann said. The boy went on to spend five days aboard the train heading to meet his brother in Vancouver.

Although the boy had a belly full of confiscated goods when he boarded the train, he had no money for food on the journey.

"But every time the train stopped, he hopped off onto the platform and played his accordion," Carrie-Ann recounts. "Women gave him a bit of food, men gave him a bit of money. And he arrived in Vancouver with a profit of $30."

Bravery, Carrie-Ann believes, is the defining characteristic of the immigrant. “Whether you came hundreds of years ago or last week, you are walking away from what you know into the unknown. I can’t think of anything braver than that.”

At its heart, the museum strives to tell the immigration story (not just that of Pier 21) in full — the good and the difficult, the policies and the politics — but what she hopes people leave with is something simpler.

“Pride,” she says. Pride for their families and pride for a country built by Indigenous peoples who have endured for millennia and by immigrants brave enough to begin again. The threads of these stories remain woven into neighbourhoods, languages, storefronts, and supper tables across the country.

When Christina visited Pier 21 for the first time, she stood in the assembly hall where her parents, Ontario and Anna, had once waited.

“It was a very emotional experience for me,” she says. “You’re walking through there, you hear the stories, and I just get emotional thinking my parents were here.”

Anthony carries a similar reverence. “I have so much respect for the immigrants of that time,” he says. “They came here to this country, they struggled, they worked. They did it for their families.”

That, in the end, is the legacy of Pier 21. Not only the arrival, but what followed: families built, communities formed, children and grandchildren who stand in those same rooms and understand, perhaps for the first time, what it took to begin again.