Lorraine Bracco's voice sounds like a hug feels. It is a voice for belting "Oh, my God!" at news that delights or amazes her, for describing people she adores as "delicious." On "My Big Italian Adventure," the HGTV show documenting her renovation of a house in Sicily that she purchased for one euro, her voice booms joyously down cobblestone streets as she takes a sledgehammer to a wall that needs removal — "Oh, yeah! So satisfying!" — or as she good-naturedly shouts "Momentito!" to a local who is speaking faster than her interpreter can interject.

Bracco needs an interpreter because, though her grandfather and great-grandfather were from Sicily and though she found fame in two of the most iconic Italian American pop cultural artifacts of our time, "Goodfellas" and "The Sopranos," the closest the Bay Ridge native comes to speaking the mother tongue is her brassy Brooklynese with un poco italiano thrown in, assisted by enthusiastic hand gestures.