The Roots And Wings An Expat Can Have

The Roots And Wings An Expat Can Have

The Italian immigration story to America largely took place around 100 years ago under a unique set of circumstances. Italian-Americans today are mostly a third and fourth generation population, assimilated into American lifestyles. What must it have been like for my grandparents and great grandparents living in agricultural southern Italy with little access to alternative work and opportunities to seek a new life in a new land? The challenges and sacrifices they had to make to settle in a new country and rebuild their lives and grow their families were enormous. My story is not so much a look back into history, but rather a modern story of the same ongoing reach for a new life in a new land while carrying the culture of the Italian and American people with me to be replanted. As with all expats, we are the seeds of our ways that yield the fruit of our heritage even when scattered by the wind to far away places. What soil do you thrive in and what will you grow to be?

My grandparents on my father’s side and great-grandparents on my mother’s side of my family emigrated to the USA more than one-hundred years ago. I was born in New York City and grew up surrounded by the cultural influences that they brought with them to the new world. Core values of food, family, friends, church, homemade wine, pasta, and garden grown vegetables was present in my life from my childhood. The last of my immigrant grandparents of my family passed away when I was a teenager and living in America without them was just not the same anymore. Maybe I was living in the wrong neighborhood and felt out of place to try to continue old world ways in the new world. I wanted something different from what was available to me then and there.

For this reason, many years later I became an immigrant in the Republic of Georgia. Why to Georgia is more chance than logic would imagine. However, here I felt the old world all around me again. It’s amazing how similar the Georgian values and culture are to my grandparents old Italy. In Georgia, time seems to have stopped at around the time my grandparents left Italy. Now I am the immigrant and reliving some of their struggles in a foreign land and once again enjoying similar traditions. I once again live in a multi generation household, same core values, and making wine and farming in our village, too. I don’t think that I could have fully appreciated their story and now my own situation without knowing my Italian immigrant grandparents before me.

I became a commercial pilot and flight dispatcher for Alitalia Airlines after finishing university and was based at Kennedy Airport (JFK) in New York as a young man. My colleagues all came from Italy. Years later I served as the on air radio host of Ciao Italia Talk Radio Show, broadcasting live on WCBM-AM from Baltimore, Maryland every Saturday afternoon. We produced approximately 100 shows of one hour length each. Even I marvel at the events that lead me to each new adventure and how I eventually settled in Tbilisi, Georgia, after growing up and living in America for so many years. Especially, given my involvement with an Italian airline, Italy, and the Italian-American community in New York and Baltimore. I think that without all of my background to act as the nutrients for a good life, I could not appreciate the soils on which I have stepped.