Tag Archives: Lou Carlozo

As a native of Italy’s insular island to the west, Karim Galici brings a fresh slant to his work as a theater pioneer and experimental director. Among Italian artists, Karim Galici is unique in large part because of where he comes from in Italy. The island of Sardinia, he notes, is in some ways more like its island neighbor to the north than the rest of Italy, even though Corsica is part of France. Perhaps this explains in part why Galici tackled the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery for the theatrical work “The Little Big Princess,” which traveled to Chicago …

As executive director of the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, Marianna Gatto has made it her life’s work to celebrate L.A.’s rich and largely unknown Italian legacy. Los Angeles is all too well known for its Hollywood heavies, rock stars and thriving Latino culture. But as Marianna Gatto will gladly tell you, Italian roots run rich and deep there in ways unlike any other American metropolis. Gatto, who serves as the executive director of the Italian American Museum of Los Angeles, dreamt of forming the institution that she now runs ever since first setting foot in an abandoned Italian …

Chris Vaccaro created a digital-age dynasty at Topps that built on the glory days of America’s most legendary baseball card company. If we’re lucky, we live out childhood dreams in adult careers, the preeminent example being the Little Leaguer who makes the starting lineup of a major league baseball team. While Chris Vaccaro never swung a bat at Yankee Stadium, he hit a grand slam when he became editor-in-chief and digital director at the Topps Company. Having collected sports cards as a kid — thousands of them — Vaccaro already had a heartstring attachment to the Topps product. Yet as …

From the canals of Venice to the vineyards of Piedmont, Gia Marie grmella is hot on the trail of uncommon Italian stories.   If you were to pick a current documentarian for the subject of a documentary, Gia Marie Amella would be a smart choice. Together with her partner, Giuseppe “Beppe” Mangione, she’s the force behind Modio Media, a production company that first came to the attention of the Italian-American community with the 2007 release of “And They Came to Chicago: The Italian American Legacy.” In the intervening decade, Amella has pursued an ambitious production schedule that’s equal parts frenetic …

  A student of commedia dell’arte since her college days in Bologna, Chiara Durazzini champions the art form here in America through her troupe, Pazzi Lazzi. As a champion of commedia dell’arte — an Italian theatrical tradition with roots in the 1500s — Chiara Durazzini is used to hearing theater aficionados confess their ignorance. In some cases, not even Italian Americans quite know what it is. At least that’s what they say, anyway. As the Florence native likes to tell people, “If you think you haven’t seen commedia dell’arte, maybe you have — and just didn’t know it. Shakespeare based …

  Passionate about opera in general and lesser known Italian works in particular, Emanuele Andrizzi has set his sights on launching the Midwest’s first opera festival. Conductor, composer and pianist Dr. Emanuele Andrizzi caps his emails with the declaration of another Italian artist, World War I-era writer Gabriele D’Annunzio: “Ama il tuo sogno se pur ti tormenta,” or “Love your dream even though it torments you.” It’s a refreshing tonic to the somewhat mushy 21st-Century mantra “do what you love.” And it defines Andrizzi’s steady path toward artistic mastery. Grit and persistence characterize Andrizzi, who started learning his craft, honing …

With gratitude, grit and generosity, Walter S. Arnold is on a mission to save an Italian cemetery’s incredible, endangered works. To see Michelangelo’s sculptures of the Unfinished Slaves — a 16th-century project meant for the tomb of Pope Julius II, but abandoned when the money ran out — is to behold figures clenched in an eternal, tortured struggle to break loose from the marble that encases them. They bear mute testimony to what the artist once said, that he worked to liberate forms imprisoned in marble: that his job was simply to remove the extraneous. And many sculptures must be …

Her family has made music strings for hundreds of years. As head of the D’Addario Foundation, Suzanne D’Addario Brouder toils to make music education possible for underserved kids. Imagine growing up among music royalty, the guitar-string makers to the stars. These days, the roll call of artists using D’Addario strings includes the likes of Keith Urban, Dave Matthews, Joe Satriani, Al Di Meola, Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits — and if you’ve got a few hours, we could supply you a list of hundreds more. Is it fair to say that the D’Addario family — which has been at this …

A first-time filmmaker, she took her passion for an Italian-American tradition to the finals of a prestigious national cinema competition. There are many who feel they have a film inside of them, but few who have the vision and gumption to make that dream a video reality. And for those who get at least that far, the results often bear an amateurish, awkward stamp. Given those obstacles, Kirsten Keppel’s emergence as a documentary filmmaker is, indeed, the stuff of movie legend. Keppel turned her fascination with ancestry into artistry in her 2017 documentary “Ringraziamenti: The Saint Joseph’s Day Table Tradition.” …

By bringing stories of Calabrian-American bravery to light, he is adding chapters to our history that would otherwise have been lost. The saying “history is written by the winners” typically applies to military forces that dominate and subjugate, but one person has turned that notion on its head in the most positive sense. In his painstaking research into long gone Calabrian-American veterans, Peter Belmonte has achieved a victory for scores of humble heroes whose stories would otherwise have been lost in the trenches of World War I. Why do this? It helps that Belmonte is a retired U.S. Air Force …