Highlights

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 …

Yesterday I read about an Italian-American neighborhood that was the original Little Italy in New York City. No, not Mulberry Street in lower Manhattan but East Harlem above 96th Street. Today, both those areas are “Italian” by the skin of their teeth. Mulberry Street is enveloped by Chinatown. East Harlem is better called Spanish Harlem (nicknamed El Barrio) for the massive influx of Puerto Rican and Dominican residents after World War II. What I was reading was an article in Atlantica Magazine from July 1934. No food or fashion, Atlantica was probably the first intellectual periodical in our community. The …

A new project in the beating heart of Apulia promises to connect the world with the deepest soul of the Italian South. There is an Italy that does not reveal itself at first glance — a land of infinite horizons and immense skies that challenge the frantic pace of the modern world. This is Capitanata, the beating heart of northern Apulia, where the Tavoliere plain stretches out like a golden sea, interrupted only by the silvery green of olive trees and the orderly rows of vineyards. Here, amid the dust of history and the scent of must, a new way …

A full-time MLB umpire since 2011 and a crew chief since 2023, Dan Bellino is upping his game on behalf of his compatriots as president of the Major League Baseball Umpires Association. When Fra Noi last checked in with Dan Bellino in 2011, he’d just been named a full-time MLB umpire after spending parts of three seasons as a replacement. In the 14 seasons since, Bellino has umpired 1,758 MLB games and earned the respect of his peers: In 2023 he was promoted to crew chief and just last year was chosen by his peers to serve as the president …

  As I began to traverse the moss-covered rocks submerged in the shallows, king salmon and brown trout darted between my feet like slalom skiers shredding through gates. The cold, rushing water compressed my waders as I cautiously crossed the river. In the distance, I saw my dad’s cast spiraling gracefully through the air, the colorful line painting brushstrokes across the sky. I waded on, looking for a good spot of my own, then stopped. Upstream, I spotted a king salmon lying in wait for any food drifting along with the current. I carefully began to release the line, then …