When I was  a teenager dreaming to travel to the US,  I admit Buffalo wasn’t on my list: admittedly, my knowledge of America was limited to what I saw on TV — Texas, California, New York City — and to the Pacific North-West, as you would expect from any Gen-X  kid who grew up on a diet of bread-and-grunge.

Things changed once I left Italy, moved to another country to go to college and met a large number of Americans: from California to Indiana, from Michigan to Missouri and Alabama, all the way to  Louisiana, New York City and Upstate New York. We were — between the years of our MAs and PhDs — a family for almost a decade. Even now, with me back in Italy and the vast majority of them back in the US, we are still pretty close.