Italian-American Travel Journalist Wins Travel Writing Award For Video Produced In Campania Village

Jun 25, 2018 908

New York City Based Travel Journalist Valarie D’Elia wins NY Press Club Award for Best Travel Writing For TV. “The Making of a Maestro, from Castelfranco to Carnegie Hall” is a feature about a global music figure who shares roots in the same small Italian village as the reporter, Valarie D’Elia.

The 8:30 piece takes an intimate look at the backstory of Sir Antonio Pappano, the conductor of both the Royal Opera in London and Rome’s Santa Cecilia orchestra. This story documents Pappano’s trajectory from his humble roots to his debut at Carnegie Hall. The report is a visually stunning and highly personal tale about the universality of music, the immigrant work ethic and the pull of our roots, which inspires one to do both great and small things.

For the most part, D’Elia’s story is based in Castelfranco in Miscano, Italy; the result of five years of development and production between 2014-2017. Indirectly however, its genesis dates more than a century, in the same small village D’Elia’s paternal grandparents left behind for America when they were children.

The story took Ms. D’Elia from Italy, to the subject’s childhood home in Connecticut, winding up in New York City where the Maestro makes his debut at Carnegie Hall.

As the producer, reporter, writer and videographer of this segment which aired on WLIW21, a PBS station in New York, D’Elia stumbled over cobblestone streets and upon the idea when she regularly started visiting Castelfranco, a province of Benevento to connect with her Italian ancestry.

In 2014, she discovered that a memorial concert had been established in the village, performed every summer to honor the father of this highly regarded symphony conductor. (D’Elia returned to shoot the concert four times.)

With the popularity of ancestral travel, and the focus of news coverage on immigration issues, she realized this could serve as a positive story with layers of texture.

Based upon her relationship to and obvious passion for the village, the Maestro and his family provided D’Elia generous access to help illustrate all angles of his very endearing and revealing narrative.

The concert by the Maestro, free to the public, takes place this summer on August 12, 2018 in Castelfranco.

About Valarie D’Elia: Valarie D’Elia was born into a family travel business dating back to 1902, when her great-grandfather booked his friends and relatives from Italy to Ellis Island in steerage class on transatlantic ocean liners as part of the immigration wave. Today Val continues the family tradition as a travel expert with a focus on ancestral travel.

She recently moved on from a nearly 20-year stint on NY1 News with her popular segment “Travel With Val” that took her to 103 countries, and on about as many cruises. Val is currently developing and seeking funding & distribution for TV programming with a specific focus on geneology-based travel.

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