Defining her identity and pinpointing where she feels most at home — in Italy or the United States — has never been easy for Raffaella Spilotro, the director of the children’s summer camp at Casa Italia in Stone Park. That’s because, for the first nine years of her life, Spilotro grew up in Capurso, a small town in the province of Bari, Puglia, with her parents speaking only Italian.

Her mother and father came with their families to America in the 1960s, met and married here, and decided to move back to Italy when she was 2 months hold. When they returned to America nine years later, they first settling in Schiller Park, where she enrolled in the fourth grade, and two years later in Addison, where her parents still live. To this day, they speak a mix of Italian, English and the Pugliese dialect at home, sometimes in the same conversation.