Enrico Caruso fled the 1906 San Francisco earthquake clutching an autographed photo of Theodore Roosevelt, stopped for bacon and eggs, and used the photo as identification to board a train out. This episode traces the Naples-born tenor from his apprenticeship building public water fountains at age eleven to his rise as arguably the world's first global media celebrity. We also examine the family myth that he was the 18th of 21 children, when genealogical research shows he was the third of seven.

We cover the brutal reception in Naples in December 1901 that led him to vow never to sing there again, his 1902 gamble recording ten tracks for the Gramophone Company when serious artists dismissed the phonograph as a toy, and his arrival at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903. We follow the suspicious 1906 Central Park Zoo arrest, the Black Hand extort ...