While he was growing up in Chicago Heights during World War II, Dominic Candeloro wasn’t at all proud of his Italian ancestry. His father was a low-paid construction worker who only learned a few words of English. That and the fact that Italy was fighting against the Allies made him ashamed of his roots. The feeling persisted after the war, when the peninsula was in shambles and the country was frequently referred to as “war torn” in the press.

It wasn’t until Candeloro saw Fellini’s film “La Dolce Vita” while he was pursuing his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University that he began to realize there was so much more to Italian life and culture than he had read about in the papers.