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Mike DeFeo, Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast general manager, has been announced as Southington UNICO’s 2021 Gold Medal of Honor recipient. The recognition is UNICO’s highest honor. Since 1945, the Gold Medal of Honor has been awarded to distinguished citizens in the Southington community. A dinner ceremony in recognition of DeFeo is planned for Wedne...

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After weeks of intense voting, Hearst Connecticut readers have chosen the winner of the iconic eatery bracket. Edging out Sally's Apizza, the number two seed, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana has claimed the top spot as the most iconic eatery in the state.  The apizza restaurant survived four rounds of voting, in which it fended off Modern Apizza, R...

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The Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport was the site of the 2022 Bridgeport Regional arm of the NCAA women’s basketball Sweet 16 and Elite Eight tournaments this past March. But at the end of the year, the arena will be filled, not with basketball fans, but opera fans. Italian opera star Andrea Bocelli is scheduled to perform. The tenor will be stop...

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Nardelli's Grinder Shoppe continues to open more Connecticut locations to sell their famous Award-Winning grinders. G. Matthew Youngs, the franchise owner of the newly opened location in Norwalk, CT, – as of March 2022 – discovered Nardelli's in 2012 when he and his friends were at a lacrosse tournament in central Connecticut. After experiencing Na...

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This week's edition of the Local Flavor features Nasoula Koutsofavas of Maria's Pizza Palace in Colchester. Koutsofavas was born and raised in Griswold and Colchester by her parents, both newly immigrated from Greece. They found work in the United States in the restaurant industry and carved out their own paths. It's there that Koutsofavas found he...

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Saugatuck Sweets in Fairfield and Westport is known for its ice cream but also its outreach. Owner Al DiGuido founded the charity Al's Angels 25 years ago to help kids with cancer. He's now supporting the millions of people fleeing Ukraine.  "We said, 'We have to start to do something.' We can't sit on the sidelines watching this all happen and say...

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Coffee lovers in Norwalk might have a new go-to spot in town. Pausa Caffè, an Italian coffee shop, opened its doors on Sunday. "People say that when they walk in they feel like they are in a little shop in Italy," said owner Stafano Cutugno, who used to own a coffee shop in Sicily before moving to the United States eight years ago. When Cutugno mov...

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Just when we were preparing to write about him, Anthony Riccio left us. He left us at just 69 years old, all of a sudden and without a fuss, which was just his style. Anthony had become a photographer as a child, developing photographic negatives in his house’s bathroom in New Haven, Connecticut. For his whole life, he worked as a librarian at Yale...

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Tucked away on a dead-end road in Hamden is what may very well be the center of Connecticut’s Italian cheese universe. The Liuzzi family started making cheese back in Italy in 1832. They brought that expertise to America in the middle of the 20th century, and they’ve been making it under the Liuzzi Cheese label since 1981. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (...

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It was Mrs. Sargent’s admiration for the Italian work ethic that encouraged Sargent & Co. to recruit Italian men to come to New Haven to work for the hardware manufacturer. When the immigrants arrived in New Haven from Ellis Island, those who were conscripted to work at Sargent, which was located on Water Street in a large multibuilding complex, we...

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