Abruzzo Unscripted

Gone, But Never Gone — The Abruzzese Diaspora

Next week, I'm boarding a flight to Abruzzo for three months of work on this very project — and even with a return ticket in my pocket, I can't stop thinking about leaving without my wife. That ache is what sent me down this road: what did it feel like for the people who left Abruzzo with no return date at all?

In this episode, I trace the story of the Abruzzese diaspora — one of the largest and least-told migration stories in Italian history. We go back to the collapse of farming and herding in the 1870s, follow the wave that peaked around 1913 to Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, and sit with the postwar years that sent men to Canada, Australia, and into Belgium's coal mines under the "men for coal" agreement — the same mines that led to the Marcinelle disaster. Along the way: the Pennsylvania and West Virginia mining tragedies that swallowed up men from Abruzzo's own Roveto Valley, the household names you didn't know were Abruzzese (Perry Como, Dean Martin, Madonna's family), and a city-by-city look at where Abruzzesi built new lives — New York, Boston, Toronto, Sydney, and beyond.

This one is personal. I share my own family's story — my great-grandfather Antonio, who left for work before being conscripted and killed on the Isonzo front in 1917, and my grandmother's uncle, Zio Giuseppe, who emigrated to Pennsylvania and became one of my family's open mysteries. If you have any connection to the Di Vincenzo family of Lettopalena, I'd love to hear from you.

The diaspora didn't end in the 1950s — it's still happening today. This episode is about the ones who left, the ones who stayed, and everything that gets carried across an ocean either way.

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A pot of polenta, boiled over an open fire and spread across a bare stone so a group of displaced neighbors could eat from it together — that's the memory my grandmother gave me from Lettopalena during the German occupation of late 1943. I carried that image around for years as just another old war story. I don't anymore.

In this episode, I use that memory as the doorway into a bigger question: why was meat so scarce in the mountain towns of Abruzzo through the 1800s and into the 1900s, especially heading into March — and what did people actually eat instead, season by season?

We get into why a goat or a sheep was never "food" so much as walking capital, what the real peasant diet looked like once you strip away the postcard version of the "Mediterranean diet," how Lent and the pre-harvest lean season collided every March, and how dishes like pallotte cacio e ova and Lettopalena's own sagne stracciate were built specifically to work around not having meat. I also sit with something I've wondered about for a long time: how much of my grandmother's own lifelong, meat-light, vegetable-forward way of eating traces back to a childhood where there simply wasn't much else on the table.

As always, I try to keep what's documented and what's family memory or my own reasoning clearly separated as I go.

🎧 Full sourced write-up will be published on my Patreon page for my members at abruzzomember.com.

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I've lost count of how many times someone connected to this project has asked me the same question: aren't you afraid to move back to Abruzzo, knowing what that ground can do? It's a question I ask myself too — probably once or twice a month. So this episode is my honest answer.

I lived in Abruzzo from 1979 to 1984, and during those five years I felt the earth move more than once. On November 23, 1980, I was watching TV with my brother when the chandelier in our living room started swinging — my mother slammed her toe into a door running to reach us. On May 7, 1984, I was in karate class in a glass-ceilinged gym in Sulmona when the ceiling started rattling like a passing train. I walked out into Piazza Tresca and found the whole town outside, terrified — with no cell phone to tell my mother I was okay.

In this episode I trace both of those nights against the real seismic record — the 1980 Irpinia earthquake that shook nearly all of Italy, and the 1984 Abruzzo sequence that hit Lettopalena and Altino, my family's own towns — and then I try to explain something I still don't fully understand about myself: why knowing all of this hasn't made me want Abruzzo any less.

This one's personal. Grazie for listening.

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🎙️ Abruzzo Unscripted — the real Abruzzo, not the postcard.

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Once Full of Life: A Childhood in Abruzzo, a Region That's Gone Quiet, and the Truth About Bringing It Back

Growing up outside Sulmona in the early '80s, I rode in the back seat of my grandfather's candy-apple-red NSU Prinz, windows always sealed shut against a "colpo d'aria" he was sure would put you in bed for a week. Outside that window was a region that was loud — a market you could get lost in, three generations at every picnic, neighbors who stopped to talk, not just deliver. I even knew people born in the 1800s. That world is largely gone now, and in this episode I go looking for why.

I start with the memory — Sulmona and the towns around it, full in a way that's hard to describe to anyone who's only seen them today. Then I get into the harder part: the two things the Italian diaspora most often blames for depopulation — restrictive citizenship laws and the lack of affordable housing — aren't actually the mechanism, and I explain why. I dig into what the data really shows is driving the decline: jobs, services pulling further away, a demographic clock that's difficult to reverse. And I get into the part almost nobody in diaspora spaces wants to talk about — where these towns have come back to life at all, it's often been immigrant families settling in permanently, not descendants like us visiting seasonally.

I close with why I'm moving back to Sulmona myself, most of the year, and what I actually expect to find versus what I know is gone for good.

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🎧 Abruzzo Unscripted — the people, places, culture, and language of Abruzzo, unfiltered.

The Man They Believed In: Mussolini's Charisma, and What It Cost Abruzzo

Mussolini's birthday — an uncomfortable anniversary, but a revealing one. Before he was "Il Duce," he was a poor blacksmith's son and a socialist journalist. In this episode, we go beyond calling him a monster and ask the harder question: why did he work on people? We sit inside the fear, exhaustion, and humiliation of post-WWI Italy to understand the appeal, trace who really financed his rise to power (hint: it wasn't the poor), and follow that same charisma twenty years forward to the alliance with Hitler that put the Gustav Line through the Abruzzese mountains — and through my own family's hometown of Lettopalena. This one gets personal, tracing what my grandmother lived through in the winter of 1944.

Full written version available on my Patreon membership site: abruzzomember.com

Part of the Abruzzo Unscripted WWII and Mussolini/Fascism series.

On November 21st, 1943, German paratroopers entered the Limmari forest near a small Abruzzese village called Pietransieri. Inside four remote farmhouses, roughly 125 men, women, and children were sheltering — people who hadn't obeyed evacuation orders, who had hoped the trees would hide them.

By nightfall, almost all of them were dead. Machine-gunned, the buildings dynamited. Some of the wounded, including children, lay among the rubble for hours. No one came.

For decades, barely anyone outside that corner of Abruzzo knew it had happened.

This episode is the story of the Pietransieri massacre — what led to it, who carried it out, what happened to the few survivors, and why the pursuit of justice failed almost completely. It's also the story of two local historians, Paolo Paoletti and Lando Sciuba, whose work in the 1990s finally brought this crime back into the light after fifty years of institutional silence, misfiled documents, and Cold War-era inconvenience.

No one was ever convicted. The legal battles over compensation continue to this day — as recently as December 2024, an Italian appeals court ordered Germany to pay a further €4 million to thirty more families. Whether that money arrives is another story.

This one took time to research and to get right. I hope it does justice to the people it's about.

For those of you who understand and appreciate the time and effort that go into producing this kind of content, I would be forever grateful if you considered donating to this project.

This is the first episode of the Abruzzo Unscripted podcast! I talk about the direction of the show and discuss my earliest memories of my very early childhood. I hope you enjoy it! Please consider leaving a comment!