Dear friends, happy new year! The horrendous 2020 is behind us, we're past it. 2021 will still be difficult, but the beginning of the end of the nightmare has begun, and we have reasons to be hopeful.

It was 2012 and they started then, on a small Italian newspaper called L'Opinione, my interviews that then led to something that you don't even know, which was called LinkItalia, and then to We the Italians. Ten years of interviews is a long time, and in February we will publish the two hundred and fiftieth. It is a goal of which we are proud and happy, but we will talk about it next month. 

In the meantime, the seventh book of We the Italians is out: the yearbook with the interviews of 2020. In 2020 we interviewed 27 people, friends of We the Italians, who gave us 23 different points of view on 23 different topics of the relationship between Italy and the United States. You can buy it here: please, buy the book! For you, as a gift for friends and family. Please check a preview here. Thanks

We would like to share with you some numbers regarding our 2020, in addition to the interviews. During 2020 we published on our website 6,463 news items (2,499 of these were about Italy, the others about something Italian in the United States); 199 articles in the 12 issues of our Magazine; an yearbook (with 2019 interviews) in print and digital formats; 165 videos and 97 audio podcasts. Our archive of websites about nonprofit organizations, groups, departments, festivals, museums, associations, and foundations celebrating something Italian in the United States contains 1,498 records. During 2020, we sent out 1,542,313 newsletters: with 12 months, 9 areas and many of you subscribing to more than one, this is the final number. We surpassed 49,000 likes on our Facebook page. We have a LinkedIn group with 1,190 members (we expect you, come join us). We are also on Twitter (1,151 followers), Instagram (2,842 followers) and YouTube (466 subscribers), and we plan to improve our presence on all of these social media. During 2020, for obvious reasons, there was only one in-person event we attended, at RAI Italia at the beginning of the year; but we participated in 7 virtual events between radio, television, podcasts and the internet, all documented in the Events section of our website. In addition, through our fundraising we raised and donated € 53,000 for the fight against coronavirus in Italy, organized the first online Columbus Day with 50 leaders of the Italian American community in 20 different American states, and opened our virtual store with more than 20 gadgets with our logo. It has been a very difficult year for everyone, but once again ... we are just getting started.

Once again, I’m very happy to tell you that our family is growing! We have three new members, very welcome here on We the Italians. The first is Carol Faenzi, and she will represent us in the Hoosier State, Indiana. Carol owns the lifestyle brand, My Tuscan Aria, which offers small group, luxury excursions to Tuscany. She will soon launch a home and fashion textile line created from her private art collection of Renaissance images. Carol is also the author of the historical novel, The Stonecutter’s Aria, based on the true stories of her marble-carving ancestors from Carrara, Italy. www.mytuscanaria.com.

The second is Nicolino Applauso, and he will represent us in the Old Line State, Maryland. Nicolino Applauso, PhD, is and historian of Italian language and literature and is the president and founder of the Applauso Italian Learning Center, LLC and teaches Italian language and culture at Loyola University Maryland and Italian, Spanish and Latin at MorganState University in the United States (where he founded the Italian program in 2018). His research path is multifaceted and includes both the medieval period (Dante and the strands of epistolography and comic and satirical literature in the Italian Middle Ages) and contemporaneity (political satire in music and mass digital media and demographic evolutions in Italy in the 2000s). His recent publications are the books Dante's Comedyand the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy: Humor and Evil (Lexington Press, 2019); Dante satire: Satire in Dante Alighieri's Comedy and Other Works (with F. Alfie, Lexington Press, 2020); Italy Today: Changes and Challenges in the 21stCentury from WWII to the Coronavirus Pandemic (with M. Mignone†, Peter Lang, 2021). We are now represented in fourteen States out of fifty.

The third new member of our family is our new Instagram manager. His name is Max Scoli. Max is a Senior at the University of Michigan. He is a third-generation Italian American who is passionate about his heritage and preserving Italian culture in the USA. I’m so glad to have Max on board, we’ll do very good things together.

There is a delicate topic which concerns the assault against the American Congress in Washington DC happened on January 6. I'm not entering in any political topic, but this thing I'm going to tell, you regards Italy and the Italian American community. The whole world saw the very ugly images of the leader of the criminals who violently broke into the Congress, the guy with the horned helmet dressed as a shaman and with the tattooed face. He claimed his name was Jake Angeli, and that was enough for the Italian newspapers to automatically decide that the most famous criminal in the world at that moment was an Italian American. There was not even one document, video, audio or internet page in English or any other language saying that he was Italian American: but they did not control, they did not check, they did not ask. He was a criminal with a family name ending with a vowel: thus he had to be Italian American. Once upon a time that used to be how the American newspapers treated Italian Americans, well unfortunately now it seems that that's how the Italian media behave.

At We the Italians, we decided that we had to do something. I know that none of you Italian Americans knew anything about this, but we were ashamed about this behavior and the superficiality that it shows. So we sent 27 emails of protest to 27 different Italian media, some even more than once, and we actually got a few promise to publish a denial of the fake news. Well, it worked: finally, the Italian press has stopped describing as Italian American Jake Angeli, whose real name is Jake Chansley, as we explained in our emails of protest. I can't assure you that we can get all the credit for this, we are not comfortable in bragging too much or assigning ourselves merits beyond those we have. But we won, and I'm very happy about that, at least as much as I was ashamed when I saw this inexcusable behavior by the Italian media here in Italy, as if all the decades of stereotypes that hit hard the Italian Americans in America were not enough.

Please keep following We the ItaliaNews, the video and audio podcast about what happens in Italy at the time of the coronavirus. It has now become a real news program on Italy in English, each episode of which is seen by more than 1,500 of you. We have reached 170 videos. It's a big effort, but we care about it and it's part of the service we give to all of you, everything for free.

And please, check our new virtual store. Now you can find more than 20 products in different colors: t-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, onesies, mugs, notebooks, pillows, totes, tapestries, pins, laptop and smartphone cases, magnets, stickers, masks. Buy We the Italians!

I want to remind you of the great initiative that sees us as protagonists together with our partner College Life Italia. Together with them we created a scholarship fund that can give young Italian American or American children who love Italy the opportunity to study and play sports in Italy. Both the students who apply for our Master Program and the students interested in the Study Abroad program will be eligible to obtain a scholarship. A dedicated commission will take care of evaluating all the applications. We invite all those interested to write an email to info@wetheitalians.com.

Well my friends, once again it’s all for now. Please stay safe, please stay healthy. I won’t gonna stop saying this: the future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades! But please, protect yourselves and wear the mask, too. Ciao from Rome