America’s Italian immigrants brought many things with them from their homelands–food and culture, and sometimes even the names of the cities and towns they left behind. But how does a town name connect Italy and America now? That’s the question that an Italian journalist has tried to answer in a new book about a trip across America, a trip that took him through eight Italian-named towns, including our Verona.
To write Un’Altra America (“Another America”), Alberto Giuffré visited a Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Rome, Venice and Verona in America. For each, he seems to have picked the American city most different from its Italian namesake: For Palermo’s counterpart, Giuffré picked a Palermo in the northwest corner of North Dakota that was little more than a grain silo before oil drilling created a mini-economic boom a few years ago. Palermo, Sicily (Giuffré’s hometown, by the way), has been a center of culture and commerce for Greeks, Arabs, Phoenicians, Romans and Normans for thousands of years.
At each stop, Giuffré weaves a story of the people who live there and larger issues in America now, from the economy and technology to religion and sports. “I wanted to find a way to tell something different from the usual stuff about the United States,” he says. “I wanted to visit places that people usually don’t visit in the Unites States, and tell stories of the ‘deep’ America.”
Un’Altra America is organized by town, and Giuffré opens every chapter with a reference to a song or two. “It was a way to put a soundtrack to things,” he says. “I have been fascinated by the U.S. since I was a kid. I tried to find in those towns things that reminded me of the music I had listened to and the books I had read.” Giuffré tried hard not to criticize what he saw in America, like the church painting in Rome, Georgia that depicted The Last Supper as a picnic on grass. “I am a journalist so I tried to make a report of what I saw,” he says. “No judging, apart from the pizza in Naples, Florida.“ (A hot mess of cold cuts, served with fried chicken wings on the side.) And he discovered that, while towns today may be thousands of miles apart in different countries, they often share the same interests, like fantasy football in the U.S. and fantacalcio for soccer in Italy.
So why stop in Verona, N.J. when there are Veronas in 21 other states? Though there are many families with roots in Italy living in Verona now, we didn’t start out as a tribute to the former Roman stronghold in northern Italy. Our Verona’s first European settlers were from England and Germany and we were initially called Vernon until the Post Office, in 1857, needed to end confusion with a town in Sussex County of the same name. No, Giuffré picked our Verona in part because MyVeronaNJ.com had responded to many emails from him in 2014 when he was doing research for Un’Altra America.
In our Verona, Giuffré found a way to tell the story of America’s hopes and heartbreaks. He opens the chapter with a touching portrait of the Tanelli family, who had emigrated to Verona from a small town north of Italy’s Naples in the 1970s. You can see the Annin Flag factory from the windows of their home and Franca Tanelli, the mother, became one of the most sought-after seamstresses there over a 30-year career. Giuffré notes that even after Annin moved the bulk of its flag production elsewhere in America, it kept Franca Tanelli busy working on specialty flags, like the one created to remember the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The Tanellis, like many people in Verona, had a close connection to those attacks. Their older son, Nicola, had worked at the World Trade Center towers, but had been transferred out just before the attacks. Nick Tanelli had achieved a fair measure of the American dream–college and a career as a Wall Street lawyer–but in 2013 he died, almost overnight, from an odd strain of the flu.
“The sigh of relief they had breathed 11 years earlier evaporated from the Tanelli’s house, where–and now it is clear why,” Giuffré writes, “gazing out at the factory with the expectation that it would reopen is just a way to keep from looking at the photos of Nicola on the walls.”
Un’Altra America has been well received since its publication in Italy in May, with favorable reviews by some of its biggest newspapers and magazines. That’s given Giuffré hope that the book, which is now only available in Italian, might some day be translated into English. Even if you don’t read Italian, you can sample the book on the website that Giuffré has created to accompany it.
In the meantime, he’s glad he got to experience our Verona in person. “One of the first things that I had discovered when I was researching the book was the story of Mrs. Tanelli and the 9/11 flag. I had reached out to them before I left for America but hadn’t heard back. Then, just before I was to leave, I called and they picked up the phone. ‘We’re waiting for you,’ they said. I went to their house and listened to their stories. The good things and the bad things. I thought wow, the whole thing started finding out their story and now I am here in their house. “
