An April assortment of Italian Connections:
Actress Sophia Loren, perennial poster pick for Italian female beauty, will make her big-screen return, to the theater near you, later this year in “Nine.” Sophia, born September 20, 1934 was christened Sofia Villani Scicolone and grew up in Pozzuoli, Italy, near Naples.
She met her future husband, Carlo Ponti, at a beauty contest in 1950 and after a lengthy legal rocky road, when Carlo was able to obtain a divorce, they married in 1957. The couple stayed together until Ponti’s death in January 2007.
Carlo Ponti was born December 11, 1912 in Magenta, Italy, an industrial town near Milan and had earned a law degree from the University of Milan in 1934, prior to taking a place on the board of a film company. Sophia Loren and Mr. Ponti had two children, Carlo Jr., the music director of the San Bernardino Symphony Orchestra and Edoardo, a filmmaker.
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Buttons, like the one I wore in ’84 when Geraldine Ferraro was Democratic Presidential nominee Walter Mondale’s pick for Vice President, and the custom of wearing your candidate’s face and/or motto on your lapel is not the product of a modern day media hype to boost name recognition. I was surprised to learn that the very first political button was worn by “the father of our country”, George Washington – in 1789 at his first inauguration in New York. His button, made of brass, read “G.W. – Long Live the President.”
The phrase was modeled after “Long live the king.” These political-type buttons were worn by many present at this historic event and continued to be worn by citizens in our young country as other candidates ran for office. There were no active political campaigns as we know them, so buttons continued to be popular. When the tintype was invented, pictures could be used on the buttons.
These were surrounded by a metal frame with a hole punched in the top so a ribbon could be attached and worn on the lapel. It was not until the campaign in 1860 of Abraham Lincoln that the picture of a presidential candidate could be used on buttons. For the first time a voter hundreds of miles away from Washington could actually see what a candidate looked like. The 1860 buttons for Lincoln are easily distinguishable from his 1864 re-election buttons as his famous beard was by then on all of the political photos of the Civil War president.
Later buttons could be made by placing a thin piece of celluloid protective covering over printed paper and then wrapping it around a metal disk. Many colorful designs were created during the golden age (1896-1916) of campaign buttons. For the past 100 years, slogans, pictures, and names have been used to promote candidates and causes. If your candidate does not win, you still have a nice souvenir.
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“Chick Lit”, Very Valentine, authored by Adriana Trigiani, may be, but for this old hen, who rarely reads non-fiction, this novel was everything extolled on the book’s back cover blurb “delightful, dazzling, hilarious, heartwarming, stylish, sophisticated, satisfying” and much more. I could not put it down until the finale, but vicariously it was a joyous journey of dreams fulfilled and celebration of love and loss.
The book “Very Valentine” (aka Valentina) is dedicated to the memory of author Adriana Trigiani’s grandfather, Carlo Bonicelli, a shoemaker, which is very fitting since via book jacket I learned that “In this luscious, contemporary family saga, the Angelini Shoe Company, makers of exquisite wedding shoes since 1903, is one of the last family-owned businesses in Greenwich Village.
The company is on the verge of financial collapse. It falls to thirty-three-year-old Valentine Roncalli, the talented and determined apprentice to her grandmother, the master artisan Teodora Angelini, to bring the family’s old-world craftsmanship into the twenty-first century and save the company from ruin.
While juggling a budding romance with dashing chef Roman Falconi, her duty to her family, and a design challenge presented by a prestigious department store, Valentine returns to Italy with her grandmother to learn new techniques and seek one-of-a-kind materials for building a pair of glorious shoes to beat their rivals.
In Tuscany, Naples, and on the Isle of Capri, a family secret is revealed as Valentine discovers her artistic voice and much more, turning her life and the family business upside down in ways she never expected.” Nota Bene Dear Readers: Buy the book, read it, then pass it on to the young budding Italian American beauties on your family tree so they too can meet the Roncalli and Angelini families, a vibrant cast of colorful characters who navigate tricky family dynamics with hilarity and brio, from magical Manhattan to the picturesque hills of Bella Italia, Call your local bookstore, try www.amazon.com or visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on favorite Harper Collins authors.
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Adriana Trigiani first caught my eye, pictured on the cover of a cookbook “Cooking with my Sisters”, one hundred years of family recipes from Bari to Big Stone Gap (Virginia), a book she co-authored with her four sisters Mary Yolanda, Lucia, Antonia, Francesca and Ida Trigiani.
The cookbook, which featured Italian cooking American South style, garnered great praise, i.e. “Cooking with my Sisters is the best Italian cookbook ever written by women from the American South. Adriana Trigiani and her sisters had the genius to unite a Southern sensibility with Italian cooking, and the stories of the Trigiani family alone are worth the price of admission.” (Pat Conroy, author.)
“My mama is from Sicily, my daddy is from Louisiana; Adriana’s collection of Southern-style Italian American recipes and stories is as familiar to me as a family album. In both our families, life experiences are all related to and through the food we share. This collection fills the heart as full as the stomach! Mangia, y’all!” (Rachel Ray, TV Celebrity Chef.)
In addition to non-fiction “Cooking with my Sisters”, which she co-authored, she has published over a half dozen fictional titles: Big Stone Gap, Big Cherry Holler, Milk Glass Moon, Lucia, Lucia, The Queen of the Big Time, Rococo, Home to Big Stone Gap, and Very Valentine, published in early 2009. Adriana Trigiani is also an award winning playwright, television writer, and documentary filmmaker.
She has also written and will be directing the big-screen version of her first novel, Big Stone Gap, in addition to writing the Viola Chesterton Chronicles, a young adult series for Harper Collins Children’s Books. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter. Visit adrianatrigiani.com for more information.
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