You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here," Mark Twain famously wrote about Hartford in 1868. Visiting the capital of the Constitution State 150 years later, as the ambassador of Italy to the United States, I can see why one of America's greatest writers, whose novels have been read all over the world, was moved by the beauty of this town.

It is therefore no surprise that many Italians and Americans who proudly claim their Italian origins have moved to Hartford and Connecticut and now call this great state home. Such a large, active and well integrated community, among whose members towers Ella Grasso, one of the first women to be elected governor of a state in the U.S., warranted the re-opening of an honorary consulate in Hartford on Tuesday.