by John Mancini | Aug 10, 2025 | Uncategorized
It was the 14th day of August in 1480 that Western Europe got another lesson in Islamic studies. On that day 813 Italians were beheaded by Turkish Muslims in their own city of Otranto on the southern most tip of the Puglia Region. History has been exceptionally...
by John Mancini | Aug 3, 2025 | Uncategorized
The American Film Institute (AFI) honored Francis Ford Coppola last April, and I caught a rebroadcast last week. The filmmaker was lauded to the heavens for works as diverse as Peggy Sue Got Married to The Cotton Club and Apocalypse Now. But the...
by John Mancini | Jul 28, 2025 | Uncategorized
Edmund Cantilli (1927-2025) Maybe it was intuition, perhaps just coincidence. This morning, I stumbled onto the obituary of Edmund Cantilli, a former safety engineer with the NY/NJ Port Authority and aeronautical safety expert. Edmund was also an early member of the...
by Rosario Iaconis | Jul 26, 2025 | Uncategorized
[I had the following letter published in the Financial Times on July 25th] Ian Thomson’s review of John Foot’s account of Italy’s anni di piombo (years of lead, as in bullets) makes for a fascinating yet chilling read (“A climate of terror and discontent.”) The...
by Bill Dal Cerro | Jul 24, 2025 | Uncategorized
In 2013, real-life celebrity couple Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa did a short video clip for the Funny or Die series called “Bensonhurst Spelling Bee.” It consisted of students on-stage being asked to spell “eye-talian” words...
by John Mancini | Jul 20, 2025 | Uncategorized
We don’t usually associate Italians with the “winning” of the West. But some 828,000 sq. miles of middle America, known as the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, had Italian connections. The area was claimed by France starting with the voyage of Giovanni da Verrazzano in...
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