In Italy, Father’s Day is celebrated on the Festa di San Giuseppe which honors St. Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus. And, such a celebration it is. On March 19, the day of the feast, street processions are held with marchers dressed in red, special church services are conducted, elaborate displays laden with traditional foods are assembled and community spirit fills the air.

St. Joseph is the patron saint of many things including woodworkers, family life and pastry chefs. On this special day, prayers are said for his intercession in things great and small. The celebration of this feast began as one of thanks by the people of Sicily, which was experiencing a terrible drought and famine in the 1800’s. In an act of desperation, villagers prayed to St. Joseph for relief and when it came, they began the tradition of honoring him and giving thanks to others in gratitude for what they now had. The tradition soon spread to many parts of Italy including Abruzzo and Molise where it has been strongly embraced. In the U.S., this also is a special Italian feast, carried to this country by immigrants. Today it thrives in cities with large Italian communities such as Baltimore, Buffalo, San Diego and New Orleans.

Key to the feast is food, particularly the tradition called St .Joseph’s Table and its accompanying sweets, including Zeppole pastries. AMHS member and filmmaker Kirsten Keppel created a documentary focusing on this subject in 2017, which has been recognized with a number of awards. In it, parishioners from Baltimore’s Saint Leo the Great Church describe the Table’s religious, cultural and culinary aspects as well as the making of the famous Zeppole pastries. The 18-minute video is available at this link: vimeo.com/231190592.

Thirteen dishes, mostly simple ones, typically make up the Table’s fare, all of them meatless since the feast falls during Lent. The devotional fare symbolizes the plenty that followed the Sicilian famine, and its abundance is offered in hopes for future good fortune. The table is lush with oranges and lemons, overflowing with fava beans and fragrant with flowers. The meal is capped with bucatini pasta, usually con sarde e finnochio. This is sprinkled with bread crumbs, the poor man’s parmesan cheese, mimicking the sawdust of Joseph the carpenter. Bread is also distributed to friends, relatives and people in need. Finally, the sweets are presented including the Zeppole which also are called sfinge. Traditionally Zeppole only are prepared at the time of this feast. Resembling a doughnut in shape, size and texture, the dough typically is piped, fried, filled with a ricotta cream and topped with a dusting of confectioner sugar. Of course, the foods are liberally accompanied by glasses of red wine.

For those who would rather forego recreating the entire Table of foods, it’s possible to prepare just the Zeppole pastries. In support of such efforts, here is a recipe for making them, provided by PBS chef Lidia Bastianich.

(Cathy Branciaroli is a Delaware-based, award-winning food writer and a member of the AMHS. Her website, Delaware Girl Eats, has been honored nationally for its enticing posts and its narratives about the stories behind the dishes being featured.) 

March/April 2022

Dear members and friends:

Spring is on the way! It may or may not bring baseball, but it is coming just the same. It remains the season of new beginnings, ushering in many natural delights for us to enjoy.

When spring does get here, it will unfortunately meet up with the Omicron variant of COVID-19, which will likely still be causing problems. The resurgence of Omicron cases in December and January prompted the AMHS to postpone its planned first program of the New Year. The program was to have been an in-person event in which Eric Denker, the Senior Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art, was to be the guest speaker. Our consolation though is that we can continue to look forward to his presentation on Venice, as we will present Mr. Denker at an in-person event later this year. In place of our postponed event, we held a virtual discussion of the documentary film “My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes”, which recounted the bravery of many Italians who put their own families at risk in saving the lives of thousands of Jews, partisans and refugees during the Holocaust. Jim Toscano, who is himself a filmmaker, led the discussion and offered numerous insights into both the content and the techniques used in the film. The timing of our event was purposeful, as it took place just three days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Participants in the excellent discussion of this outstanding film included Italian Americans joining us from coast to coast — from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, which is one of the great advantages offered by virtual events and made possible by today’s technology.

By the time you read this, we will have offered another interesting event in the remote format. On February 27, we presented “Italian Louisiana: History, Heritage, Tradition”, a virtual talk by historian and author Alan Gauthreaux. Mr. Gauthreaux discussed the history of Italians in New Orleans, explaining the many ways in which these immigrants shaped the culture of the city. It is a fascinating topic, and I hope that you were able to enjoy it. Please stay tuned for additional upcoming events because our Program Committee has enlisted a number of excellent speakers who will talk on topics of interest to just about everyone.

Speaking of topics of interest, do not miss Nancy DeSanti’s piece later in this edition. It describes the kind of adventure that we usually only see in the movies or in travelogues. AMHS member Willy Meaux has made a life-changing decision to return to his ancestral roots in Abruzzo. He and his wife purchased a farmhouse and surrounding land, on which they plan to establish a vineyard. Check out this exciting endeavor inside this Notiziario and then dream along with the rest of us.

I would like to thank the many members who have contributed to our Annual Scholarship Fund. To date, we have received $9,415, which not only breaks last year’s record-breaking amount but also represents the largest sum of monies raised in the history of our scholarship appeals. Your generosity is a clear indication of the value you place on our Scholarship Program, which may very well be the most important undertaking in our mission to preserve and promote our shared heritage and to pass along an appreciation for it to future generations. Our campaign continues, so it is still not too late to make a contribution if you would like to be a part of this record-setting success.

Regarding our scholarship program, I am pleased to announce that the AMHS has received a generous donation to start an additional and separate scholarship fund. The fund will select winners from applicants who are majoring in music. It will be named for Angela Lastrico Raish, a longtime friend of several AMHS members. Please be on the lookout for additional details on this exciting expansion of our scholarship program.

In the meantime, enjoy the spring. I am looking forward to it, and I am also looking forward to seeing you at one of our future events — whether in person or virtual.

Best regards,
Ray LaVerghetta

March/April 2022

On January 30, 2022, the AMHS held a virtual discussion of the documentary film “My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes,” led by Detroit-based documentary filmmaker and Society member Jim Toscano.

The film was selected for discussion to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2022, marking the 77th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in Poland, where 1 million of the 6 million Jews perished during the Holocaust.

To realize how this is relevant in today world, it was reported that the day after Holocaust Remembrance Day, just a few blocks from Casa Italiana at Union Station, a man was arrested for spray-painting Nazi swastikas on the station’s walls.

And not long ago, in 2020, a survey was taken by a group of educators and historians, interviewing Americans 39 years old and under (millennials and Gen Z) all across the country. This survey found that 63 percent of these young Americans did not know that 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust and, shockingly, 11 percent thought that the Holocaust didn’t happen or that it was caused by the Jews.

So maybe that’s why this year there have been a number of commemorative events in our area. On January 24, 2022, the Italian Cultural Institute and the Embassy of Italy hosted a webinar live-streamed from Italy with Auschwitz survivor Edith Bruck, an author who lives in Rome and who gives talks in schools all over Italy. One of her books included a “Letter to God” which drew the attention of Pope Francis, who made a two-hour visit to her apartment last year.

And the U.S. Capitol Historical Society hosted a webinar, now available on their website, with a lecture by Dr. Peter Hayes, a leading Holocaust expert. He addressed the questions of how and why did it happen? Why did no one stop it? And how is this relevant today? His answers were interesting — and also chilling.

The documentary discussed by our AMHS members and guests was sponsored by the Italy and the Holocaust Foundation. The film, narrated by Isabella Rossellini, tells the story of the famous cyclist Gino Bartali, who came from a poor Tuscan family of devout Catholics. After winning the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the late 1930s and becoming famous all over Europe, he was married in 1940 by the Cardinal of Florence, who would later recruit Bartali into a secret network that delivered forged identity papers to Jews hiding from the Nazis and Fascists. The film includes an interview with Bartali’s son and a member of the Jewish family who hid in the basement of Bartali’s home. “Good is something you do, not something you talk about,” Bartali famously said. “Some medals hang on the soul, not on the jacket.”

The film poses the profound question: “Would you risk your life to save a stranger?”

One of everyone’s most memorable characters was the 107-year-old elegantly dressed man in a wheelchair, interviewed in the piazza of his small town, who still vividly remembered how his town had all come together to hide the Jews, at the risk of their own lives. This “conspiracy of silence” took place in small towns across Italy, and the film shows many moving scenes of survivors returning to thank the children and grandchildren of the people who helped save them.

Lynn Sorbara, whose father served in the Army in World War II in Europe,remembers him telling her about the Ferramonti internment camp in Calabria run by the Italians, where prisoners were treated more humanely than in camps run by the Germans. In the film, one of the survivors returns to the camp and remembers being there as a child with her parents and then, in an emotional moment, she spots their photo on the wall.

Peter Bell asked about the use of re-enactments in the film, and Jim gave us some interesting insights into the pros and cons.

Carmine Spellane and several people remarked that, while the controversial role of Pope Pius XII is more widely known, they did not realize how much the priests and nuns did to help save the Jews, refugees and partisans during the war. Assisi was especially mentioned as a place where, in the spirit of St. Francis, Gino Bartali would deliver the forged identity papers to the convents and monasteries. The film shows many instances of tolerance and respect for one’s fellow man, even in a small way.

Many thanks to the Italy and the Holocaust Foundation for sponsoring the making of such an important and relevant film (available on Amazon Prime and Apple TV). And many thanks to Chris Renneker for organizing the event and to Jim Toscano for leading us in such an interesting discussion. 

March/April 2022