Jeff Savastano has been around Boothbay for so long, you might think he's a native. But other than the three-story Victorian-style farmhouse he and his wife, Adele Bielli, share in East Boothbay, there aren't many similarities to his childhood in Providence, Rhode Island. As his name implies, Savastano's father, Americo, was Italian. His mother, whose surname was Winfield, was pretty much everything but.

Americo Savastano came over by boat from his family’s little hill town outside Naples, Italy, alone, when he was 6 years old. Family friends had come earlier and settled in Providence. “My whole family wanted to come to America,” Savastano said. “They told my grandmother to send them over. They had plenty of room.”