Luigi Del Bianco’s Italian Roots: The Mount Rushmore Carver from Friuli
The chief stone carver of Mount Rushmore — the man who cut the expression into the presidents’ eyes — was born in Meduno, in the Friulian province of Pordenone.
The chief stone carver of Mount Rushmore — the man who cut the expression into the presidents’ eyes — was born in Meduno, in the Friulian province of Pordenone.
Documented family tree & key facts Vincenzo Sellaro — physician; founder of the Order Sons of Italy in America (1905). b. Polizzi Generosa (Palermo), Sicily, 24 April 1868.Parents: Giuseppe Sellaro (b. Polizzi Generosa, 20 Sep 1837), master shoemaker × Serafina Polizzotto (m. 31 Dec 1867). The line — Sellaro, of Polizzi Generosa (Palermo), Sicily Vincenzo…
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Before he was the great screen idol of the silent era, he was Rodolfo Guglielmi — born in Castellaneta, in the province of Taranto, to a Puglian father and a French mother.
Documented family tree & key facts Lady Gaga — Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. b. New York City, 28 March 1986.Her Italian roots are on her father’s side: two Sicilian lines from the Province of Messina, both families of shoemakers. (Her mother Cynthia Bissett’s side is American.) Paternal grandfather’s line — Germanotta, of Naso (Messina) Antonino…
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The composer who reinvented the tango was Argentine by birth, but his roots run to two corners of Italy — the Adriatic port of Trani in Puglia, and a mountain village above Lucca in Tuscany.
Documented family tree & key facts Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen — “The Boss.” b. Long Branch, New Jersey, 23 September 1949.His Italian roots run through his mother, Adele Ann Zerilli; the Springsteen surname is Dutch, from his father Douglas. Maternal line — Zerilli, of Vico Equense (Naples) Andrea Zerilli, caffettiere (the family behind the Gran…
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“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” The line the song mourned had a birthplace all along — Isola delle Femmine, a fishing village off Palermo, where the ballplayer’s parents were married in 1897, their names still in the register.
Two Italies meet in the blood of New York’s legendary mayor: the Catholic South of his bandmaster father from Foggia, and the Jewish Adriatic of his mother, born in Fiume.
In 2023 Sylvester Stallone raised his grandfather’s barber-shop key on a town-hall balcony in Puglia. Behind the actor lies a Puglian line documented, generation by generation, in the Italian archives — from Gioia del Colle and Palo del Colle back more than two centuries.
Behind the most famous American voice of the twentieth century lie two Italian towns — Lercara Friddi in Sicily and Rossi di Lumarzo in Liguria — and a paper trail that leads straight back to them.