In 1969, my father Angelo and mother Onorina bought a house in Coney Island. My parents had come over to the United States just ten years before, but then we'd returned to spend four of those years in Italy.

I still had the traces of an accent from my first language, the dialect spoken in Vallemaio, a village of 600 people in the mountains to the south of Montecassino. My mother's family spoke a variant of the Napoletano dialect with its beautiful freight of Latinisms and 18th-century Spanish words.

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Fonte: La Voce di New York