Growing up, I thought everyone was Italian. Like innocent until proven guilty, you were Italian until proven otherwise. My 10-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend that Italy wasn’t the only other country to exist and people had different traditions than we did. New Jersey Italian is its own kind of culture. If you drop us in Italy, our accents would give us away, and we’d stick out like sore thumbs, but in Jersey, we fit right in.

Even if you’re not Italian, you can’t avoid the hundreds of restaurants and accents when you live here. It’s almost overwhelming, the amount of culture in one place. When I moved to college, I realized how much my location impacted my way of growing up. In upstate New York, I wasn’t running into a random family member every day, and no one was asking me about my last name whenever I introduced myself.