Taste of Italy Golf Outing draws record numbers to lush greens
By Carol Ann Benanti The fourth annual Taste of Italy Golf Outing & Dinner — celebrating the life achievements of Corrado "Joe" Manfredi to benefit Casa Belvedere — played to perfection Wednesday at Silver Lake Golf Course, where more than 120 linksters took to the lush greens on the time-honored course. Manfredi arrived in Ne...
The Baths of Diocletian won the Europa Nostra Award
The EU Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Awards was launched in 2002 by the European Commission. The Prize celebrates and promotes best practices related to heritage conservation, management, research, education and communication. In this way, it contributes to a stronger public recognition of cultural heritage as a strategic resource for...
Great Moments in Italian American Political Speech-making
1947. The great New York populist Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (pictured) gave the last known public speaking engagement of his life. The 5'2″ WWI hero with a history of personally relishing political combat, made this stinging appraisal, "My generation has failed miserably. We've failed because of lack of courage and vision. It requires more cour...
Italian billionaire loves American classic cars
Italian billionaire Nicola Bulgari is on a crusade to remind Americans that they build the best cars in the world and always have. That's the motivation for the stunning collection of cars in the N.B. Center for American Automotive Heritage in Allentown, Penn., where family cars the average American could own and drive get the kind of exquisit...
Syracuse Italian American Athletic Club donates 500 cases of water to Flint
By Katrina Tulloch The Italian American Athletic Club of Syracuse has donated 500 cases of water to the people of Flint, Michigan. News of the Flint water crisis broke in 2015, but Anthony Catania, the treasurer of the IAAC, hadn't heard about it until he saw Flint residents on the "Steve Harvey Show" last spring. "People fro...
The Holocaust in Italy: The Life and Times of Primo Levi
September 13 (Tuesday) 7:00 pm. The Holocaust in Italy: The Life and Times of Primo Levi. A presentation by Francesco Bonavita. Primo Levi is perhaps one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. As a survivor of the Holocaust, he went on to document the horrors of his experiences in The Periodic Table, If Not Now, When? and The Monkey...
La dolce vita in Italy, 2,500 years ago
by John Jamison Are we not all agreed that Italy stands for the good life? Espresso, pasta, Chianti and seaside villas. Even if we've never gone there, we have an image in our minds of how the Italians came up with a culture with universal appeal. Milanese handbags, sleek Vespas and Maseratis — yes, all these things we can't affo...
Albert Bellson was Minnesota's mandolin maestro
Italian immigrant Albert Bellson was considered Minnesota's master mandolin player and teacher in the 1920s and '30s, an era when big string orchestras were all the rage. Despite his lofty stature, Bellson took time every week to walk from his downtown St. Paul instrument shop and music school to the Rondo neighborhood. That's where he coa...
Silicon Valley comes to Naples: Apple prepares to open Italian academy
San Giovanni a Teduccio, a downtrodden suburb of Naples, is a far cry from Silicon Valley. The crumbling apartment buildings, the walls covered in either graffiti or church death notices, and the ubiquitous clotheslines hung outside people's windows do not leave the impression that the neighbourhood is a centre for high technology. An...
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day: Wendell replaces Columbus Day
The town has all but divorced itself from Christopher Columbus following a unanimous vote at Thursday's special town meeting. Residents opted to designate the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples' Day, instead of Columbus Day, in recognition of the continent's original inhabitants. The article, submitted via petition by Wanita Se...
Your New Italian Tour de Force Goes Like This
With all due respect to Nonnas around the world... Please, take a seat. For now we share a world with Mazzi Cucina, a new sliver of eccentricity serving some of the most authentic Italian we've seen around these parts in a while, now open in North Miami Beach. Before you launch into one of those "Oh, another Italian restaurant" m...
An Italian Thanksgiving Feast with Theresa
by Emily Kluver Anyone who thinks their Thanksgiving tradition of roasting a turkey and mashing potatoes is complicated should talk to Theresa "Terry" Scotto-Spinelli. This lifelong and well-known local around Carroll Gardens knows a thing or two about holiday feasts. Many days, Scotto-Spinelli can be found working in Scotto Funeral Home,...