Six years ago, I took possession of two large boxes which contained the papers of Antonio Nicola Pisano (1894-1979), my maternal grandfather. He came to America from Gasperina, a mountain village overlooking the Ionian Sea in Catanzaro, Calabria, Italy. He was sixteen years of age, and settled initially in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. The portrait on the left was taken about 1915.  Antonio was a writer of poems and plays in Italian. He started a theater troupe called the Filodramatic Circle Gasperinese active between the First and Second World Wars in the neighborhood of 7th and Christian Streets. He was a storyteller and my babysitter. Among my earliest memories were sitting beneath this photo of his parents, Giuseppe and Maria Innocenza Voci Pisano.  Here he taught me the value of family history, and stressed the importance of remembering our ancestors. Thus, he passed on his interest and passion to me; leaving me with the task of having his story remembered.

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