Highlights

A photographer by training, Mark Guglielmo now uses his background as a springboard to explore a range of themes. A native of New York City, Mark Guglielmo started taking pictures at age 12 with a Kodak Instamatic he purchased with profits from his paper route. Transfixed by the magic of making images, he studied photography at Hastings High School and Haverford College, often sneaking into the darkroom on weekends and after hours to hone his craft. Initially inspired by British artist David Hockney’s “Pearblossom Hwy.,” Guglielmo, now based Northampton, Massachusetts, creates layered figurative works exploring themes of identity, migration and …

A retired offensive lineman on this side of the Atlantic, Justin Pugh has been tasked with taking American football to the next level in the land of his wife’s ancestors. After 11 seasons as an offensive lineman for the New York Giants and Arizona Cardinals, the next act of Justin Pugh’s life in American football has taken him to Italy, of all places. In February Pugh, 36, accepted the job of commissioner of the Italian Football League, becoming the first American to hold the position. Don’t feel badly if you haven’t heard of the Italian Football League. Pugh only learned …

Love your country, serve your community, answer the call of duty: These are the lessons of Caesar Rodney’s midnight ride from Delaware to Philadelphia in July 1776. Many know the broad outlines of the story. The Continental Congress was deadlocked on formally separating from the British Empire. Delaware’s delegation was split. Thomas McKean urgently sent word to Caesar Rodney, who was serving in Dover, that he was needed in Philadelphia to break the tie. Rodney immediately set off on the 80-mile journey, condensing a three-day trip into mere hours. The miracle of his midnight ride is further underscored by the …

Fra Noi is only months away from monumental changes in the way we look, the stories we tell and the technology we deploy to share those stories with the world. As we enter the home stretch of this miraculous transformation, I thought it fitting to shine a spotlight on the person who started us down that road. It’s time for you to meet Fra Noi Chairman and Publisher Nicholas Giuliano. Nick is the picture of a successful American businessman, serving as chairman of a thriving bank with six offices across the Chicago area. But make no mistake: Within him beats …

The VP of ticket operations for the White Sox, Mike Mazza is happy to be scrambling to meet surging demand during the team’s breakout season. Mike Mazza has been helping White Sox fans attend home games for nearly 40 years, first as a seasonal worker in the ticket office and now as vice president of ticket operations for the team. In addition to making sure the process of attending the minimum 80-plus White Sox home games each year is a breeze, Mazza and his team have helped the club pull off some huge special events and popular promotions over the …

When I was hired in 1990 to save Fra Noi, I knew exactly what I was getting myself into and what I had to do. That’s because I briefly served as its managing editor five years earlier, when it was ably helmed by one of my personal heroes, Jim Ylisela. Fra Noi had been bleeding red ink and readers for a while as a glorified newsletter for Villa Scalabrini when Fr. Cozzi, who ran both, hired Jim to stanch the flow. A gifted writer and editor, Jim quickly transformed Fra Noi into a newspaper of record for the Chicago-area Italian-American …

It was on July 7, 1946, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, that Pope Pius XII canonized Frances Xavier Cabrini, making her the first U.S. citizen to be named a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Four years later, that same pope named her the patron saint of all immigrants. All of this happened about 30 years after her passing in 1917 at the age of 67 at Columbus Hospital in Chicago. Between then and when she arrived in America at the age of 38, she had founded 67 orphanages, hospitals, schools and other social institutions worldwide. This year, …

They say still waters run deep, and that’s certainly been the case lately with Fra Noi. We may appear to be moving at our usual pace, but since we announced plans last year to dramatically up our game, we’ve been toiling tirelessly behind the scenes to make that happen. By early next year, Fra Noi will boast a new look, new features and a wide-ranging digital campaign aimed at sharing our publication with the world. As we head into the home stretch of that transformation, the time is ripe to look back at how it all began. Fra Noi came …

Rosario Iaconis did a splendid job in the March issue of illuminating the vast Roman legacy overlooked in Ken Burns’ documentary “The American Revolution.” Also conspicuous by their absence from the popular PBS series are the many Italians who played pivotal roles in the birth of our nation. Iaconis made mention of the seminal contribution Filippo Mazzei made to the Revolution, noting that Thomas Jefferson derived “all men are created equal” from a 1774 essay penned by his dear friend. There’s so much more to that story. A Tuscan physician, Mazzei moved to America in 1773 to establish agricultural experiments, …

In late 18th-century Palermo, beneath the glare of the Sicilian sun and the shadow of Baroque palaces, power rested on a fragile mixture of absolutism, clerical privilege and historical myth. It was here that Giuseppe Vella, a Maltese abbot attached to the Benedictine abbey in Monreale, carried out one of the most audacious intellectual scams in Sicilian history. Claiming to translate ancient Arabic manuscripts, Vella fabricated texts that rewrote the island’s medieval past in ways that conveniently served Bourbon rule and ecclesiastical interests. The forgery — later known as the Council of Egypt — suggested that many aristocratic privileges had …