I last wrote about how, aboard the Italian Line’s Saturnia on my family’s way to Italy when I was 9, I found myself attracted to one of the girls who was (at the very least) 13. Tall and shapely, with a bronze complexion, she had a braid of thick black hair resting on her shoulders. She wore a ladylike wristwatch but, in an attempt to shake off the torpor of being cooped up on the ship, she ran wild with the rest of us kids on deck like a feverish Amazon until her cheeks bloomed kiss-me red. She seemed to …

In early July 1960, my parents, sister, great-uncle Ernie and I sailed from New York City on a ship of the Italian Line, the “Saturnia.” Its name evoked Italy as the land of Saturn, where the old god, father of Jupiter, ushered in the Golden Age with his reign. The hulk itself, however, built in 1927 and only five years from the scrapheap, didn’t quite do that for us, especially in tourist class. A little sink garishly illuminated by an overhead light was the focal point of our cabin, which was below deck, so forget about the portholes I’d been …

My parents had several good reasons for the scrimping and saving they did in the late ’50s in the Bronx. I learned about one of them when, on a spring evening of 1960, my father came into my room with a question: “You want to go to Italy with us?” As cautious as Dad was, he had decided to take a summer-long unpaid leave from his construction job in the days when workers like him received no vacation time. My parents, my 5-year-old sister and my 9-year-old self would soon embark on a lengthy adventure. Mom and Dad hadn’t seen …

During my Bronx childhood in the ’50s and early ’60s, we ate outside our home only at relatives’ houses, on picnics, at outdoor religious festivals or at wedding receptions at nearby catering halls. The ritual of those marriage celebrations was as carefully choreographed as Sunday Mass or the initiation ordeal of medieval knights. After the bridal party was liberated from the extensive (and expensive) photo shoot behind the scenes, the emcee announced them and then belted out, “And now, for the first time anywhere, it is my honor to present to you … Mr. and Mrs. X!” Thunderous clapping and …

I remember a day, many years ago, that dawned gray and raw. Peering down from behind my sixth-floor window, I saw what had been a typical South Bronx street mantled in drifts of untrodden snow. Fat flakes were still falling obliquely against the streetlights, and the Sears Car Repair Center parking lot directly beneath my window looked eerie. Its ingrained splotches of motor oil had been temporarily blanketed, and the candy store/bookie joint across the street looked almost cozy. A stray dog crossed the deserted road, leaving tiny paw prints behind as he picked his way amid the swirling snowfall. …

When I was a little kid in the Bronx, I naturally imbibed my notions of thrift from my parents and our Italian American milieu. An example occurs to me from the time I conceived a craving for Silly Putty. My mother and I were in the five-and-dime on Third Avenue when, right there on a toy shelf, I spotted a few dozen of the little plastic eggs that had become the latest childhood craze. But it occurred to me, what can you really do with Silly Putty, which was essentially a big wad of gum? Yes, it bounced and could …

Legend says there were no poor people in Prester John’s vast empire, but there were quite a few in our Italian enclave of the South Bronx in the ’50s. In those days, Italian immigrants who didn’t want to stay poor were thrifty with the few dollars left in their pockets after the monthly bills were paid. Humble as their dwellings in Italy might have been, they considered apartment living in America a distasteful expedient, especially since the apartments they could afford were often located in tenements. Almost all our Italian neighbors were saving to buy their own homes and, given …

In memoriam, Virginia Ciavolella D’Epiro (1926-2025) “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days,” said Ben Franklin, but one of the qualities I admired most in my parents was their unstinting hospitality toward family members. Some didn’t yet have a place of their own in the U.S. or needed to save money by staying with us awhile, or were just passing through on their way to somewhere else. The most colorful of our many guests arrived periodically not from Italy but Lock Haven, Pennsylvania — the various members of a clan headed by my great-uncle Ernesto, who had emigrated …

Not too many Italian restaurants in this country offer snails in tomato sauce these days, but if they did, they’d probably try to gussy up their appeal — and justify an exorbitant charge — with a menu description something like this: Succulent twin-horned free-range escargots, humanely hand-harvested, smothered to perfection by ebullition in eau de pluie, served en coquille in a talented duet with a golden shower of dulcet ragù to create a symphonic ravage transfigured by gagas of sliced garlic and frissons of cheekily fresh basilicum leaves, the ensemble providing an artisanal dipping sauce nonpareil. Of course, the reality …

By the time I met Giorgio Pandone he was a very old man, but he was still chugging up the staircases to visit his paesani and sell jewelry and insurance. Tall, bald, paunchy and stately in his gray three-piece suit, with a gold watch chain spanning his ample vest, he looked like an Italian Alfred Hitchcock. He had lost a fortune in the crash of ‘29 and worked the rest of his long life to pay back what he owed and make a comfortable home for his daughter and himself after his wife died. Zi’ Giorgio (as my parents and …