Columns

The Italian Christmas Season   While in America the focus of the Christmas season is Christmas day (Natale), Italians celebrate this holiday on several days leading up to and even after December 25th.  The Italian Christmas season (periodo di Natale) begins on December 8th with L’Immacolata and ends with parades and a final exchange of presents on January 6th with L’Epifania. But, to many Italians, the most special celebration of the season is not Christmas day or L’Epifania, but instead Christmas Eve (la vigilia di Natale). See the table below for a list of the important celebrations that take place …

Those of you who read my columns would probably conclude that I am employed by FamilySearch, since I spend a disproportionate amount of my time showing everyone how to use its many features. However, for the record, I am not employed by FamilySearch or any other genealogy company. My recommendations are objective suggestions for how you can find more information on your ancestors and other relatives. Since FamilySearch is 100% free anyway, they have not made one thin dime in subscriptions as a result of my columns. I do hope many of you have used it to improve your research. …

Many years ago, I was a Pullman volunteer who served the community by giving 1 p.m. Sunday tours of the Pullman Factory site. As I got accustomed to making my presentations, I would interject points of interest based on any new information I’d been given or interesting historical details I recalled. For instance, considering the ongoing drive to make Pullman a national park, I would start the tour at what had been the factory entrance on 111th Street and head toward the administration building. As we approached the building, I would dramatically stop the tour group, have them turn around …

Roberto Rossellini’s “Viaggio in Italia” (“Journey to Italy”), restored in 4K by Cinecittà, was screened at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in September as part of the Venice Classics program. The screening of the 1954 film, starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, commemorated the 120th anniversary of Rossellini’s birth. “Roberto Rossellini was one of the greatest minds and most generous spirits Italian cinema has ever given to the world,” said Manuela Cacciamani, CEO of Cinecittà, in a statement about the screening. “Above all, he was a filmmaker who gave cinema the freedom to break the rules, to see the …

As a Bronx boy, I was intrigued by the animals on the farms of my two sets of grandparents during my family’s summer-long vacation in Italy in 1960. I enjoyed inspecting the intricate stone walls that terraced the fields on Grandpa Pietro and Grandma Luisella’s property, especially when sleek little lizards peeped out from the crevices as the day grew hotter. Often the tube-thin cats, Gatto Rosso (Red Cat) and Camicione (Nightshirt), would sneak up on a sunbathing lizard and bolt it down. Occasionally, as per the example of one of my cousins, I would snatch a somnolent lizard from …

Moving to Italy comes with a long list of practical matters to deal with: residency, taxes, health care, perhaps buying or renting a home. For Americans, however, there is another deadline that can easily go unnoticed — the one attached to their U.S. driver’s license. A valid American license does not allow a person who becomes resident in Italy to continue driving indefinitely. Under Article 135 of the Italian Highway Code (Codice della Strada), a driver holding a license issued by a country outside the European Union or European Economic Area may generally drive in Italy for up to one …

In last month’s blog, we learned the singular forms for questo and quello. But there is more to this story, as the Italian plural masculine and feminine forms of questo and quello are used to say “these” and “those.” The ending change for questo is straightforward, while the ending change for quello is more complex. Luckily, both follow the basic rules off Italian grammar!   How I learned to say “these” and “those” in Italian As mentioned in last month’s blog about how to say “this and that” in Italian,  as a child in an Italian-American household, I learned snippets …

Last month, I promised I would write a column about “The Tree”. This is FamilySearch’s section where we’re all supposed to upload our data, and merge all the duplicates together, so that there is only one of each human being in “The Tree” with as much information about that person as we have all located. Let’s say for example that someone enters their great grandparents in The Tree but all they know is the birth years and the names. Then other people add the death year and the full birth date. Then someone else adds World War I draft information. …

It’s the time of year when we look back over the preceding months and take stock of all that we’re thankful for. In the Far South Side communities of Roseland, Pullman and Kensington neighborhoods there are plenty of things that qualify. I would venture to say that the one major thing we can all be thankful for is the election of Pope Leo XIV. America’s first pope came from our neighboring town of Dolton, and he has strong ties to Roseland in that his mother served as the Mendel Catholic High School librarian for six years. Also, his two brothers …

In light of the new documentary “Pompeii: Out of Time” by National Geographic and Disney Plus, let’s revisit one of the original interpretations of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius for film, which is an equally spectacular take on that fateful day. Eleuterio Rodolfi’s 1913 “The Last Days of Pompeii” is set in the ancient city during the day leading up to the eruption in 79 A.D. Based on Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel, it is one of early Italian cinema’s epic achievements. The film follows a large cast of characters behaving badly as they obsess over wealth, beauty and passion. Actress …