I remember the first time I went to Italy at an age when I was aware enough to take in what I saw.  At an age when I was able to compare and contrast, New York, my home, and Southern Italy, my ancestral home.  My parents took me to their villages, of course.  To where they had been born and raised, even married, before they left one winter in 1967, not knowing they would never live there again, but that being their fate, just the same.

I remember the home my father grew up in, where my grandparents still lived.  I had been there before, when I was a child, was even baptized in the small chapel around the bend, where my father himself had been baptized.  But now I was a young girl, about to enter junior high, the confusion of adolescence, and I had started to understand that I was something different than the other kids at school, and the reason I was different was this place.  It was Italy.  It shaped everything about me, my family, how we were raised and how we behaved.