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My Italian Heritage

By: Mia Philichi

I have been blessed with a rich Italian heritage. My maternal grandparents came from a small Italian village named Cantalupo. Giuseppe, my grandfather, worked all day in his fields from a very young age. My grandmother, Adoloratta, likewise worked in the fields and at the age of nine was tasked with cooking and feeding the workmen at lunch. Their village was destroyed by the Nazis after the German invasion of Italy. At age 21, they were given the opportunity to leave their home in Italy and venture to America.

When they came to America, my grandparents were uneducated and could not speak English. My grandfather became a carpenter and my grandmother, a nurse. They picked berries and mowed lawns when they had time off of work. They taught their children a very important lesson by all of their hard work. "You can have anything that you want in America as long as you are prepared to work hard for it," Grandpa would always say.

They brought their many traditions and customs with them, which we practice in our family even now. Once a year, we still get together to turn many boxes of tomatoes from each of our gardens into hundreds of jars of pasta sauce. We prepare and hang prosciuttos in our wine cellar. On weekends I love to be with my grandmother as she makes homemade pasta and sauce and bakes her own bread. I have learned many of her recipes that she brought over from Italy and am always so excited to make them for my family when I get home from their house. I can't wait to pass them on to my children and to future generations. I want all of them to know how truly blessed we are to be living in this country and still maintain our great heritage.

My friends always beg me to take them with me to my grandparents' home. I always thought that every grandmother made her own pasta noodles and sauce and I supposed that all families had several course dinners, all homemade. I just assumed that every family played bocce between the fruit and dessert course of the meal. However, as I have grown older, I have come to understand how lucky I am to have such a rich Italian heritage. I feel blessed to have been taught in the Italian way and am very proud of my family and the progress they have made. I can only hope to pass these traditions and customs to future generations so that they can come to realize how amazing our heritage is.