Celebrations and Societies

Italians honoured Giovanni Caboto by naming organizations after him. They also saw something of themselves in his story, as explorers who had left Italy and were building new lives in a new country. With the First World War over and new Italian immigrants arriving in Calgary, Giovanni Caboto Loggia No. 8 was formally established in 1918 as a Calgary branch of the Ordine Indipendenti Fiori d’Italia, an Italian mutual-aid organization headquartered in Fernie, British Columbia.

The Italian explorer whose 1497 voyage helped open the door to Canada’s history. Who was this man who landed on our shores in 1497? Giovanni Caboto was an Italian explorer and navigator with an idea that would take him across the Atlantic Ocean. He dreamed of finding a shorter route to Asia — a vision that would eventually become part of Canadian history.Born around the 1450s in Genoa, Italy, Caboto later moved with his family to Venice, where he learned navigation, map readin