WTI Magazine #51    2015 January, 9
Author : Umberto Mucci      Translation by:

In our daily activity on We the Italians, we promote every day 25 news regarding Italy in the US, the Italian American community, or interesting and positive things about Italy. We aggregate news to provide a service, and we try to avoid to publish more than news about a single topic. That was just not possible about Mario Cuomo's recent passing.

Our email account, feed reader, alerts and every other way we use to welcome every possible news about Italy in the US was overwhelmed by articles, memories, tributes, eulogies, columns, op-eds about this great Italian American. We had to think about what to do: and then we decided to publish the statements from the big national organizations, and we apologize to all the others we did not publish, and to choose two or three articles about Mario Cuomo's life and career.

I haven't had the privilege to get to know him in person, but many friends of mine did: and all of them, and not only after his passing, described him as a wonderful, caring, generous person. I had the honor to interview his wife Matilda: an energetic, marvelous, beautiful person, and my heart goes to her because I am so sorry for her loss. What I learned is that Mario Cuomo simply was probably the Italian American that every Italian American would and should be: loved and respected by his community, to which he dedicated his life. May he rest in peace.

This first 2015 number of our online magazine brings to you a wonderful news, a new column that makes us particularly happy and proud: it is called "Italian Little Italies". As Italy is the country of more than 8,000 municipalities, every one with its own different history, beauty, flavors, traditions, handcrafts ... we can say that every small Italian town is a "little Italy". So, together with and thanks to "I borghi più belli d'Italia", the Association that gather several of these small towns, we decided to offer to our readers one "Little Italy" each number of our We the Italians magazine, browsing through all our 20 regions.

It is a different way to use the words "Little Italy", of course: but the majority of the Italians who emigrated to the United States came from little villages, small towns where together with their sons, daughters and grandchildren they still feel their roots and heritage are. So this is another way for us to pay them a tribute and to show all of you another aspect of the Italian cultural wealth: from now on we will have not only a column about the beautiful territory of our bigger cities or areas (Italian land and nature) or about our historical and cultural excellences (Italian culture and history), but also a testimony of the variety, the richness and the abundance of magnificent contents that lay in these small and often timeless places, in Italian called "borghi".

That's all for now. So stay tuned, fasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride. The future's so bright, we gotta wear shades!