From Italy, with love: MVI reporter fulfills dream, and traces her family’s Italian roots from Tagliacozzo to Monessen

My biggest dream in life, besides being a writer, was to visit Italy.

Weird aspirations, I know. I have traveled to Europe before, but I didn’t want to visit just to visit, and this dream wasn’t for superficial reasons.

That came to fruition this past summer, where after my parents have been to Italy a couple times already, I was lucky to join my two siblings and my parents to travel to Rome, Italy. We visited several towns in the country, including the villages I was told about growing up.

Growing up Italian on both sides of my family, it was an aspiration of mine to visit the place where my family was from. Growing up hearing about these places, I always hoped one day I was able to accomplish that dream.

One of the most significant memories I have as a child was watching my mother’s mother cook. A native of Monessen, and then raising my mother in Carroll Township, my grandma, Helen Nahas, would cook stracciatella, or Italian egg drop soup, and other Italian favorites in her tiny kitchen on Armstrong Drive near the Mon Valley YMCA.

MVI staff writer Sarah Pellis, in the photo at left, recreates a photo of her great-grandfather Vincent Giovagnorio (shown at right), both taken at the Giovagnorio family burial plot at Grandview Cemetery in Monessen.

My grandma never let me, my siblings or my cousins forget our heritage. We couldn’t enter her house she shared with my grandfather, a Charleroi native of Syrian ancestry, without being handed something to eat, a hug and kiss on the cheek and the smell of something cooking filling the air of the small, cramped kitchen that was ladened with chicken decorations.

Yes, chicken decorations. Through her love of cooking, and watching the Food Network, my grandma would often tell us stories of her trips to Italy, what it was like growing up in an Italian-American family in a small house in Monessen. She also shares stories of what it was like visiting the town her father was born — Taglicozzo, a small mountain village in the Abruzzo region of Italy, located about an hour from Rome.

Tracing the family tree

My grandmother’s maiden name was Giovagnorio, and her father, Vincent, was born on Feb. 28, 1906. My grandma reminisced with me recently about our family history.

My grandmother said her father often spoke of Tagliacozzo as a beautiful town in the mountains. He lived there with his mother Annuziata and his brother Luigi.

He immigrated to the United States after Vincent’s father, Emilio, left for the United States many years earlier to start a barber shop in Monessen near the intersection of Schoonmaker Avenue and Rostraver Street. Emilio got a house for his family at 200 Alliquippa Ave. at the corner of Second Avenue.

My grandma said Emilio was a good barber, and that Vincent didn’t know his father because Emilio immigrated to the United States when Vincent was very young.

“It was hard,” my grandma told me. “When you leave your own country, can you imagine leaving here, and going somewhere else? That’s really hard.”

Vincent’s older brother, Luigi, died a few days after his 18th birthday in 1921 after drowning in the Monongahela River. Emilio died by suicide during the Great Depression. After one of his customers left a gun in the barbershop, he shot himself and died the next day, on April 15, 1932.

The pressures of life, his son dying and trying to be a good person for his family weighed on him. Vincent gave all of his earnings from Irvin Steel Works to his dad for the house, because that was all he ever knew to do with his money. Vincent didn’t want to be a barber, and when he did retire from the steel industry, it was because he was hurt by the machinery.

He had two daughters, his wife, Felicia D’Emilio of Monessen, and his mother to take care of. My grandma was then born in 1935.

According to my grandmother, in Italy, the first born of every family married one another, and then the second born, the third born and so on.

When Vincent seeked out Felicia, the second of 11 children, it was not heard of and broke tradition.

“My maternal grandmother didn’t like that,” grandma told me. “She wanted him to get involved with (her daughter) Mary. My dad said no, he was walking away and my mother went after him. She said if she didn’t go after him, he wouldn’t come back. She loved him.”

Vincent was drafted during World War II at 38 years old, but did not go to fight because he was the sole provider for his family. When the war was over, my grandmother was 10 years old.

Beyond work, Vincent volunteered as a bartender at the Italian Hall on Donner Avenue that Emilio helped start. It was a way to meet other Italian men since there were a lot of Italian immigrants in Monessen at the time. People knew my grandmother’s parents as proud Italian immigrants, and they put big emphasis on their heritage.

When my grandma was growing up, she said Vincent and Annuziata would talk about Italy a lot. She was told that Italy was a beautiful country, and she said Vincent didn’t brag enough. My grandmother would always say to us when we were growing up that her family would hang prosciutto in their cellar, and it was delicious. But her favorite food was always her mother’s spinach and ricotta ravioli.

She said she loved growing up Italian, and we still make that ravioli every year around Easter time. I still remember making the pasta dough with my grandmother when I was a child like it was yesterday.

Vincent insisted his four daughters, Teresa, Louise, Helen (my grandmother) and Joanne learn Italian, even without Annunziata there, so they could speak to her.

“My dad insisted we learn, even without his mother there, and he didn’t care who was around when he spoke to me,” grandma said. “I had to answer in Italian, and that didn’t go over well. He said one day, you’ll appreciate it. And I did. I told him I did.”

Vincent would also take his daughters to Catholic church every Sunday until he got mad at a priest because of how he married Felicia. When my grandmother was going to marry my grandfather in the Orthodox church, my grandmother’s parents were told they would be excommunicated from the church.

My grandparents got married anyway at Sixth Street Church. I remember being told Felicia locked herself in a bathroom because she was angry with my grandmother.

My grandmother’s sister Joanne was the acting mother of the bride. None of her other sisters came to the wedding, but Vincent did.

“My dad loved me,” my grandma said. “I know he loved his other children, but there was something special between him and I. I just loved him. I just adored him, and he adored me.”

After Vincent died in 1997, my grandma visited Tagliacozzo in 1998, where she tried to find someone from her side of the family with not much luck.

Back to where it started

My family and I explored Tagliacozzo when we visited on July 11, where we explored beautiful architecture, ate delicious food, including the best lasagna of my life, and we met wonderful people who didn’t speak any English.

I took Italian classes in college, and I was using my rusty Italian skills to get us around the town, order an espresso at the piazza cafe and to speak to our driver who took us to Tagliacozzo.

“Il mio mondo ha i colori del tuo sorriso,” which means, “My world has the colors of your smile,” was on a sign hanging on one of the town streets, and the weather was sunny and hot.

I could imagine my grandfather as a young boy in this town, running around on the cobblestone streets and going to church as an altar boy.

We were also searching for the mayor of the town, who ironically, after researching the town, has the same name as Vincent and my grandmother’s side. We never found him, but I was thinking of my great-grandfather the entire time I was there, who I never got to meet, and why his family would move from such a beautiful town in the mountains of Italy to start over in a mill town in Monessen, Pa.

I realized I wouldn’t be here if my great-grandfather didn’t leave that town at such a young age to meet his father in the United States. I realized they left Tagliacozzo for a better life, a better life for future generations of Giovagnorios.

A dream fulfilled Recounting this family history is an extreme privilege, and with my grandma now being 91 years old, and I am no longer able to go to her Carroll Township home, visiting Taglicozzo allowed me to connect to a part of myself, my childhood and my heritage. It felt like another home.

I turn 26 today, Oct. 10, and who knew that at such a young age I could be so lucky to have a wonderful family, and to visit the place of my ancestors.

I am incredibly grateful, and encourage people to follow their dreams, even though it is corny, because you never know what you will learn from it.