Profiles

Working for the Italian Trade Agency since she was a university student, Paola De Faveri has devoted her career to helping Italian companies go international. The Italian Trade Agency (ITA) is the Italian governmental agency that supports the business development of Italian companies abroad and works to promote foreign investment in Italy. ITA operates through a network of 69 offices and 18 satellite offices in 74 countries. The Chicago office is led by Paola De Faveri, a native of Rome who has worked for ITA for nearly 40 years. De Faveri talked to Fra Noi about the agency, its focus …

Performing virtually non-stop since his late ’70s debut on the sitcom “Taxi,” Tony Danza has charmed his way into the hearts of legions of loyal fans over the decades. Tony Danza is one of those fortunate actors who has been around forever in one incarnation or another. Awards aside, he has also won the hearts of millions of fans across several generations as a television icon and show-biz legend. Born Anthony Salvatore Iadanza on April 21,1951, in Brooklyn, New York, he is the son of a bookkeeper mother and a garbage collector father. His deep Italian roots in the regions …

For high school Italian teacher Natalie Del Percio, the language of her ancestors is a bridge that has connected her to her heritage as well as her family throughout the generations and around the world. A dual citizen of Italy and the United States, Del Percio has roots that extend across several regions. Her mother’s family comes from Mazzano Romano, near Rome, and San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria, while her father’s family is from Volturara Irpina in Campania. Both sides of her family settled in Melrose Park. There, Del Percio’s grandfather opened a plumbing business that her father later took …

When he was about 10 years old, Lorenzo Fiorentino listened to his uncle Bernardo describe his service in the Italian Army during World War II with pride, but never glory. Those conversations planted the seed that inspired Fiorentino to join the U.S. Army, and later morphed into an unbridled desire to recognize the contribution and sacrifices of his fellow veterans. Fiorentino is the driving force behind the creation of Chicagoland Veterans Campus (CVC) located at 39 Army Trail Boulevard in a 100-year-old former school building owned by St. Paul Lutheran Church. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the CVC is the result of …

When Mary Ann Pedersen first joined the Highwood Bocce Club, she had no aspirations to be in leadership. “I wasn’t thinking in that direction,” Pedersen says. It was just before the COVID-19 pandemic and she was one of several women who took part in Sunday Funday, an informal, non-competitive experience for women who wanted to learn how to play bocce. Pedersen and her husband had joined in part because they had the time now that their kids were away at college. “I’m 100 percent Italian and an Italian speaker and I figured it could be a way to practice my …

An acclaimed actor in her native Italy, Cristiana Dell’Anna truly inhabited the role of America’s first saint when she crossed the Atlantic to star in the 2024 biopic. Ah, classic films. They just get better with age, like the wines of Tuscany. They’re life-altering and perspective-establishing. The actors become part of our families, with regular visits on phones, computers and flat-screen TVs. “They just don’t make ’em like that anymore” is a common refrain. Some films become classics over time, while others are classics the moment they hit the theaters, touching our hearts, feeding our souls and inspiring change. In …

In the firmament of Canadian theater, few luminaries shine as brightly as Antoni Cimolino. A mainstay at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, for nearly four decades, Cimolino enjoys a north-of-the-border acclaim akin to that of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Joining the renowned festival in 1988, he worked his way up from actor and general director to executive director and general manager before ascending to the post of artistic director in 2013. Since then, he has overseen the production of 145 plays, directing 20 of them, while shepherding the festival through a remarkable transformation. In his first season as artistic …

Having lived a sheltered life in the serenity of Veneto and the bustle of Chicago, Natale Cusinato was thrown into the teeth of battle as a member of the U.S. Army’s famed Americal Division during World War II. Natale Cusinato was born in Chicago in April 1917, the son of Italian immigrants seeking opportunity in America. However, the promise of the American Dream proved difficult to sustain. Struggling with language, cultural barriers and economic hardship, his family eventually returned to Cittadella, a medieval walled city in the province of Padua, about 40 miles west of Venice. There, they lived as …

Fr. Richard Fragomeni, the rector of the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii, has been known for weaving in stories about his mother and father into his homilies and using Italian traditions during Mass, but one thing he is most passionate about is the gift of music in Mass. With the recent renovation of the Shrine, located in Chicago’s Taylor Street Little Italy, one of Fr. Fragomeni’s main goals was to uphold and enhance the church’s acoustics to celebrate music in the highest regard. He is a gifted singer and piano player; something his mother, Mary, instilled in him since …

Now the principal of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral School in Chicago, Anna Cirilli owes her desire to pursue a career in school leadership to the overcrowding in Chicago public schools. Cirilli worked as a teacher for kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades at Marcus Garvey Elementary School from 2000 to 2012. Her last year there, she taught a class of 38 students with no assistance. “It was then that I realized I wanted to make a bigger impact by moving into school leadership,” she explains. “I believed that even the most dedicated teacher could only do so much when faced …