As of September 2026, video blogger Peter Santenello has over 4 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, where viewers follow his travels to various nooks-and-crannies (i.e, neighborhoods or neglected regions) within America. His accumulated knowledge has resulted in a new book Your Fellow Americans: Dispatches From Across the Country We Call Home. In it, this former English major (University of Nevada) puts into written form what he has been doing in visual form for years: As his WIKI bio notes, “using his documentary style to explore local communities through extended conversations with residents.”
No tourist spots or selfie vistas for Santenello—just good, old-fashioned, investigative journalism, allowing people, not editors, to shape facts.
I first became aware of his work in 2021 when I happened to accidentally stumble upon his channel. Though he had previously saved enough money at age 24 to travel the world, it wasn’t until he landed in Ukraine in 2016 that his interest in using visual media took hold. After returning to the US, he took a camera to the US border, which is the episode where I came in. Like old reporters of yore, he simply let the facts speak for themselves, in this case, US border patrol agents sharing their frustrations with the (then) current US policy of “non-intervention”—being told to “stand back” and allow migrants to illegally cross the border. And the video footage backed up such talk: Santenello’s camera showed thousands of migrants doing exactly that.
It immediately hit me: Why isn’t the American media doing the same? Why was the—very legitimate—issue of an open border being blatantly ignored? More importantly: If our media had done the same, might this perhaps have pre-defused the current, controversial situations involving deportations?
Anyway, shortly after that, Santenello made the shift to his current vocation of exploring the open borders of these 50 American states, with occasional forays overseas—trips to Naples and Rome, for example, where he discovered (surprise!) that even the worst areas in Italy weren’t so bad.
I’m writing about him now as his most recent video takes him “home”: Hoboken, NJ, where his family has deep roots. He drives around with his 70-year-old cousin Anthony in the city now known as the birthplace of Frank Sinatra. Anthony hits upon some interesting topics: old-school poverty vs. new-age gentrification; Hoboken’s history as both a scrappy shipping yard and an escape destination for New York’s elite; and, as he says, “the final nails-in-the-coffin” of ethnic identity—how the city’s once vibrant Italian American identity has faded via inevitable assimilation. (Prior to the Italians, Hoboken was home to the Dutch, the Germans and the Irish.)
I learned some new things in the video. For one, the reason Santenello was born and raised in Vermont is because his father got stuck in the NY subway once for three hours (“in the dark”). Then and there, he got fed up with urban life and took his new wife up to New England. (Note: To those familiar with Italian American history, Vermont was not foreign to Italians: Stone-cutters and labor organizers were vibrant forces in that state). Secondly, we learn two things about Sinatra: 1) he wasn’t as popular there as you might think (many locals considered him uppity); and 2) despite the disdain, every other old-time Italian in Hoboken seems to claim some interaction with Sinatra—stories which Anthony and others now confirm as “exaggerations.”
I want to bring up that concept of exaggeration as, of course, Santenello brings up the topic of “the mob.” He even jokingly asks his cousin, “Was anyone in our family in the mob?” To which Anthony replies, “No.” His cousin then states (accurately) that every ethnic group in our nation has their criminals.
What never gets explored, naturally, is why the American media has “exaggerated” the concept of criminality out of all proportion viz a viz Italian Americans—so much so that even college-educated people like Santenello tote the party line. The curious nature of even a curious person like him has been stunted. Such is the effect of 50 years of mob movies with nothing to balance them. Our heroes and heroines have been erased from history.
This same intellectual laziness was evident when Santenello once visited the Little Italy section of the Bronx. Locals lamented that the neighborhood has gotten a bit more crime-ridden because “the mafia is no longer around to protect it.” Santenello laughed rather than challenged this absurd statement.
But, on the whole, Santenello and his camera are part of a long line of Italic “truth-tellers.” The classical poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) was banished by emperor Augustus to Tomis (today a small town in Romania) for his saucy poems, with their inconvenient truths about love and sex. (Augustus was on a campaign to improve public morals.) During Il Rinascimento, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, which exposed the reality of human machinations. In modern Italy, journalists like Letizia Battaglia (1935-2022) used her camera to expose—and defeat—that human cancer called the Sicilian Mafia.
As for the average Italic person: Isn’t directness part of our character? If a woman asks an Italian man if a dress makes her look fat, he will say “yes.” If someone hasn’t seen you in a while, his or her first comments, after a hug, are usually, “You’ve lost weight, don’t you eat?” or “You don’t look well.”
It’s not rudeness. It’s a 3,000-year-old trait. This same pragmatism created classical Rome—a nation which then inspired our (English) Founding Fathers.
It is no irony that our nation was named after an Italian—or, that, on a smaller yet still important scale, a man named Santenello is still exploring it.
Buoni viaggi, Pietro! –BDC
John Mancini
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