Commonly, it is remembered that the first Oscar won by an Italian was in 1947 by Vittorio De Sica for "Shoeshine" ("Sciuscià" in Italian).
However, ten years earlier, another Italian had already won an Academy Award, a lesser-known man whose career was equally significant: a cinematographer named Gaetano "Tony" Gaudio, who immigrated from Cosenza, Italy, to Hollywood in the early 1900s in pursuit of the American dream.