San Antonio’s Christopher Columbus Italian Society is working closely with Councilman Roberto Treviño to rename city-owned Columbus Park and remove a statue of the famed explorer. Against the backdrop of widespread protests to end systemic racism against African Americans and other minorities, Treviño called the society’s support a “major step towa...
The Christopher Columbus statue at a park near the Museum District has been vandalized again. As in previous incidents, vandals tossed what appears to be red paint on the 7-foot-tall statue, which is located at Houston's Bell Park at 4900 Montrose. The statue also bears a cardboard sign with the message, "Rip the head from your oppressor." It's not...
The annual Grape Festival scheduled for Aug. 4-8 has been canceled because of the covid-19 pandemic, according to a news release from a festival representative. This year was to be the 122nd festival. "Due to the changing circumstances and unforeseen future due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we feel this decision must be made in order to protect the saf...
Like many of you, we miss visiting our Dallas and Fort Wort Worth museums for inspiration, or just to lose ourselves in the canvases of Rothko or Rembrandt. Many institutions had opened exhibitions shortly before the order came for us to shelter-in-place. The world-renowned Kimbell Art Museum, for example, had unveiled “Flesh and Blood: Italian Mas...
Efforts are still underway requesting the City of New Orleans to allow marker in the French Quarter which focus on the Sicilian Contributions. However since September, New Orleans has refused to proposed markers to be installed in Jackson Square, any other city land, or the river walk in the French Quarter. After the Dingley Tariff was passed in 18...
Charles Marsala, President of the American Italian Federation of the Southeast, met with Basil Russo, President of the Italian Sons and Daughters of America at the 2019 National American Italian Federation Convention. Initial start-up funding for the lodges was provided from the Marsala Cultural Fund. Each lodge was opened with twenty-five paid mem...
General Giuseppe Garibaldi and Major Roberdeau Wheat landed at Marsala, on the westernmost point of Sicily, on 11 May 1860 to unify Sicily and Italy. Wheat was from New Orleans and would take 1,600 Prisoners’ of War with him when he returned from Sicily in 1861 to fight as Confederates. The was the beginning of Wheat’s raising a group of men who wo...
Back in the early 1800s, at the height of the age of yellow fever, New Orleanians didn’t know anything about social distancing. They didn’t know anything about N95 masks. They really didn’t even know anything about germs. They did know that people were dying, and that something was causing it. Maybe it was bad air, or “miasma,” as it was known. Or...
On Good Friday 2020 The Big Easy Wing Unit of the Commemorative Air Force arranged to take New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond and Rabi Alexis Erheim on Spirit Flights to bless New Orleans from a Pt-17 Stearman bi-plane. The pilots and flight crew of the Big Easy Wing with Archbishop Aymond. The chapter is led by David Capo on the far left. Left...
The cellular network is not working well, and the connection between Milan and Texas, at the beginning, has some hitches. Busy signal. Then, seconds of silence. When I finally manage to communicate with Luca Parmitano, the planets align. Not only do I have the opportunity to say, once in a lifetime, by the way, “Houston, we have a problem”, but coi...
No one in the room will ever forget that day. It was Thursday, February 27. And the Taste of Italy planning team had met for an emergency session to discuss whether or not Taste of Italy 2020 should be postponed from its March 30-31 dates in Houston and New Orleans and its April 2 date in Los Angeles. At the time, Prowein, the annual wine trade fai...
Only weeks before COVID-19 was horridly racing across Italy, a clutch of Italophiles hosted a gloriously upbeat fundraiser for Houston’s Italian Cultural & Community Center (ICCC) — the inaugural Roman Holiday Fashion Show & Luncheon. Who better to carry the banner for the center than Roz Bilao Pactor, a third-generation Italian-American boasting a...