Saturday & Sunday, September 27 & 28, 10 - 6 PM in the Seattle Center Pavilion, Room B. and open to attendees of the "Taste of Italy" Friday, September 26, 7 - 10 PM.

For decades, Italian immigrant families who lived through World War II in the United States did not want to talk about the curfews, confiscations of fishing boats, forced moves from coast towns, police searches of their homes and internments in camps such as at Fort Missoula, Montana.

But researchers are fleshing out this obscure footnote to American history: the treatment of 600,000 Italian citizens in the United States who were classified as ''enemy aliens'' after World War II began. And that is stirring memories among those who lived through it.

In the recent past, fading family memories have been jogged by a documentary film, ''Bella Vista,'' a book, ''An Alien Place,'' by Carol Bulger Van Valkenburg, and the exhibit "Una Storia Segreta" ("A Secret Story") that has toured 21 American cities and will be exhibited at the Italian Festival in Seattle on September 27 & 28, 2008 at Seattle Center.

''The majority of Italian-Americans still don't know that this happened,'' said Lawrence DiStasi, director of the exhibit. ''There are people who come who suddenly remember that it happened to their families, too.''

At the start of the war, Italian-Americans represented this nation's largest group of foreign-born residents. There were five million of them, and all but the 600,000 had become citizens. Curfews and confiscations were imposed on members of this group within hours after Pearl Harbor, even before war was declared on Italy.

In the hunt for Fascists, Italian language schools and newspapers were closed in northern California. Relocation orders or detention orders frequently hit people whose sons were in the United States military. In World War II, about 500,000 Italian-Americans served in the Armed Forces.

Although fishing was considered a national priority for the war effort, security restrictions required dozens of Italian-American fishermen, about 90 percent of San Francisco's fleet, to surrender their boats to the Coast Guard.

The police swept through Italian-American neighborhoods in many cities, seizing from Italian citizens firearms, radios, cameras and flashlights that could be used as signaling devices. For much of 1942, most of the 600,000 Italians were not allowed to travel five miles from their homes without police permission. That restriction kept a San Francisco man, Giuseppe DiMaggio, from visiting the Fishermen's Wharf restaurant owned by his son, Joe, the baseball legend.

Growing interest among the nation's Italian-Americans, now estimated at 15 million, prompted two New York Representatives and a Senator to introduce bills that call for the declassification of documents on the wartime internment and for a Government study ''detailing injustices suffered by Italian-Americans during World War II and a formal acknowledgment of such injustices by the President.''

This will be the first time that the "Una Storia Segreta" Exhibit will be seen in the Pacific Northwest. Don't miss this opportunity to learn startling details of our Italian immigrant history.

To learn more, visit http://www.segreta.org