“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” –  Orson Welles, American actor, director, writer

Italy – My Happy Place

It all started when I was about 5 years old, when my great uncle Guglielmo came to the U.S. to visit us at our small apartment on Arthur Avenue, yes THE Arthur Avenue in the Little Italy of the Bronx. “How can you possibly live here,” he said to my father, “so far away from your family?”

 

 

I guess that’s all it took to convince him to move back to Italy because before I knew it, my parents were throwing out all “unnecessary” things, including my favorite toys, and gave away my pet, Chiquita, whom we thought was a chicken when we got it as a baby chick but then woke us up one morning at the crack of dawn, cock-a-doodling!

I remember standing in front of the building I lived in, going through our garbage, looking for whatever I thought was important, in other words my dolls and Archie comics, so that I could hide them without my parents knowing (what did I know – I was a 5 year old kid. Even that small apartment looked immense to me so I figured there had to be someplace to hide my stash without my parents ever finding it!).

A few months later, I found myself getting ready to embark on what was to be a life-changing experience, something that would affect me for the rest of my life. I, along with my parents and my older brother Bill, whose real name is Guilherme, which is the Portuguese name for Guglielmo (yes, he was named after my great uncle, but he was born in Brazil, like my mother, so she wrote his name down in Portuguese on the birth certificate, but I digress…), got into a yellow taxi and headed for the NYC port, where we began our voyage across the Atlantic on a ship called Cristoforo Colombo.

And my life has never been the same…