Discuss Roseto/Bangor

[Phil Falcone - Site Admin]

I think we have the right amount of current and former Roseto/Bangor members to have a common area to share stories. Many of you are having that "OMG" moment where you're connecting with other members one-to-one; just imagine if you could uncover even more of those because your stuff is in one common spot for ALL to reply to.

[Ken Rosato]

Linda,
Brava Nonna!

[Lynda Matthews]

Yes, Ken I think she was pretty special. I lived at her house for a couple of years when I was late teens just before I got married. I remember one night I had stayed overnight with a friend of mine who was non-Catholic. Next day being Sunday she asked me if I wanted to go to church with her and I replied that I had better get back home. When I told my grandma of my friends invite her response was "why you no go to church with her". It amazed me because I knew how strict she was with her own kids. Maybe you would like to read a blog that I did about Nonna If so you can just click on that link and it will take you to my page and my blog area. Cheers -Lynda

[Catherine Dean]

This is a very cute response!

[Phil Falcone - Site Admin]

Pasquale Cirelli kindly sent a link to the following Morning Call article:
Roseto welcomes visitors all the way from...Roseto
Borough renews Sister City program with Italian namesake.
By Matt Birkbeck | Of The Morning Call | September 28, 2008

More than a hundred years ago, Italians settled in Northampton County and created a borough named after their hometown in the northern Apulia Valley of Italy.

On Saturday that borough, Roseto, welcomed a delegation from Italy that included a city counselor from their sister city near the Adriatic Sea who came bearing gifts and ideas that could see the two towns expand their long-standing ties.

Pasquale Cirelli, from Roseto's namesake -- Roseto Valfortore, surprised Roseto Mayor Daniel Confalone with a plan to begin a high school student exchange program. Students from Roseto Valfortore would spend a year in Pennsylvania, while students from Roseto would travel to Italy, some visiting with distant relatives.

View the entire article: Roseto welcomes visitors

[Phil]

Does anyone have the full article "Roseto welcomes visitors" printed in the Morning Call? Thank you.

Phil

[Ken Rosato]

Phil,
For some reason I can't get the Morning Call website to display the article, even though it lists it. But try this link, which apparently is to a site that reprinted the article. You might have to copy and paste it to an opoen web browser.

http://www.subappenninodaunointernational.it/news/news14.swf

Ken

[Phil Falcone - Site Admin]

Thanks Ken,,, on the ball,,, as usual!

[Phil Falcone - Site Admin]

Phil, thanks to Ken's great effort, here is the entire article:

Roseto welcomes visitors all the way from...Roseto Borough renews Sister City program with Italian namesake.
By Matt Birkbeck | Of The Morning Call September 28, 2008

More than a hundred years ago, Italians settled in Northampton County and created a borough named after their hometown in the northern Apulia Valley of Italy.

On Saturday that borough, Roseto, welcomed a delegation from Italy that included a city counselor from their sister city near the Adriatic Sea who came bearing gifts and ideas that could see the two towns expand their long-standing ties.

Pasquale Cirelli, from Roseto's namesake -- Roseto Valfortore, surprised Roseto Mayor Daniel Confalone with a plan to begin a high school student exchange program. Students from Roseto Valfortore would spend a year in Pennsylvania, while students from Roseto would travel to Italy, some visiting with distant relatives.

''Funds permitting, I think this would be a great idea,'' said Cirelli.

''I agree,'' said Confalone. ''And we'd be happy to take a student into our home.''

Cirelli's visit is the first in decades by an official from Roseto Valfortore and includes a group of nearly two dozen Italians hoping to drum up business for a variety of products made in the fertile Apulia Valley, including olive oil and wine.

After meetings with potential business clients in New York and elsewhere, they traveled to Pennsylvania to see the small town across the world where hundreds from Roseto Valfortore eventually settled and called their home.

''I have a very special emotion being here,'' Cirelli said in fluent English. He gave Confalone several gifts, including a hand-made banner, a video titled ''100 Years of Roseto'' and another invitation -- to visit the homeland himself.

Confalone, whose parents and grandparents were born in Roseto Valfortore, accepted the offer, adding that he, not taxpayers, would pay for the trip.

Like Confalone, nearly 75 percent of the borough's residents have family ties to Roseto Valfortore.

The first immigrants arrived in Roseto in the early 1900s and by 1912, the borough was incorporated with a population of 1,700, where it remains today.

''This was the first completely Italian community in the nation,'' said Confalone. ''Many of the men learned the language to take jobs in the slate quarries, like my father, who became a foreman.''

Others opened businesses, such as Le Donne's Bakery, which, since 1933, has operated in the same basement in a building on Chestnut Street, offering pizza bread and tomato pie.

It was at Le Donne's where Cirelli and Confalone talked about future plans, and discovered they each knew members of one family with relatives in the two Rosetos.

''For many of us here, we have family who were born over there,'' said Confalone, "so of course we're going to have a relationship with the people of Roseto Valfortore that is really great."

[Phil Falcone - Site Admin]

THE SAFEST PLACE IN THE LEHIGH VALLEY
The town that crime forgot
Some in tiny Roseto see family ties as key to its low rate of offenses.
www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_5roseto.6680952dec01,0,298912.story
By Brian Callaway

Of The Morning Call www.themorningcall.com
December 1, 2008

There was a time when Marie Trigiani could answer her door without peeking through the window first to see who'd come knocking.

Those were the years when Rose's Main Street Café was left unlocked after it closed for the day and Elena Ruggiero couldn't make it halfway up Garibaldi Avenue on nightly walks with her mother because too many neighbors stopped them to chat.

''Everybody knew everyone because you were so close,'' 30-year-old Ruggiero said. ''You'd sit on your porch and yell back and forth to each other.''

Things are changing in the tiny Slate Belt town of Roseto, though, and many of the borough's 1,600 or so residents aren't sure it's for the better.

Statistically speaking, the borough remains arguably the safest place in the Lehigh Valley. According to recently released state crime statistics, local police reported no serious violent crimes in 2007, and the rate of property crimes, such as burglaries and car thefts, there was among the lowest in the region.

The only deadly local crime Rosetans can remember didn't actually happen in the borough -- it happened in neighboring Washington Township, where an 86-year-old woman was killed during a botched burglary in 2004.

Last year, state crime records say, Roseto police handled only two burglaries. For comparison's sake, Allentown police handled 1,335, an average of nearly four every day.

Rosetans have yet to experience the shootings or stabbings or beatings that have become too common in the Valley's cities, but crime is still a growing concern here.

Vandalism is up in the borough and police are getting more calls about domestic disputes and drug-related problems.

''I hear things going on that it's hard to believe,'' said Trigiani, 74, who's lived with her husband on Garibaldi Avenue for 49 years.

''I'm telling you, it's starting to turn,'' Mayor Daniel Confalone said. ''We don't have the total close-knit families like we had.''

Family connections

Family, as any Rosetan worth his parmesan will tell you, is the borough's most important institution -- bigger than Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, more filling than the stuffed bread from LeDonne's Bakery, and livelier than the lunch crowd at Rose's cafe.

''When I started working here, it wasn't 'What's your name?' It was 'Who are your parents?'' said Erin Walsh, the new waitress at Rose's. ''They want to know about everybody's family.''

It's been like that since the late 1800s, when immigrants, many from the town of Roseto Valfratore in southeastern Italy, began arriving from Europe to work in the slate quarries at the foot of Blue Mountain.

In the American Roseto, houses sprang up so close to one another that neighbors could just about shake hands from their front porches -- in Roseto, just about every home has a front porch.

Most of the homes still have bustling kitchens and crowded dinner tables, too.

Trigiani hosts dinners for her grown children, who each live within blocks of her, every Monday (always soup) and Tuesday (always pasta and homemade meat sauce).

She believes the town's relatively low crime rate is related to all that family time.

''I still say it all stems from the family -- respecting your family and abiding by the rules,'' she said. ''I think that has a lot to do with it.''

Indeed, Roseto doesn't just have less crime than big cities. Many of the Valley's similarly small boroughs have more crime, too. Walnutport, with fewer than 2,200 residents, had six times as many property crimes as Roseto in 2007, according to state statistics. Even police in Stockertown, with about 900 fewer residents, were busier -- there were 11 reported crimes there last year, two more than in Roseto.

Growing concerns

Over the decades, the dominance of Roseto's Italians has been eroding. While still the largest ethnic group in town, Italian-Americans are no longer the majority. In the 2000 Census, 49 percent of the town's residents claimed Italian ancestry -- down from 62 percent in 1990.

''A lot of the old people have died away,'' Confalone said. ''We're ending up with a community that's a little mixed.''

As parents die and their children move away, some of Roseto's homes have changed hands for the first time in generations.

The mayor said many of the houses have been converted into rental units -- a factor Confalone linked to at least some of the vandalism and other problems worrying residents.

''We didn't have that kind of life 20, 30 years ago,'' he said.

The town also didn't see the need for much of a police force until recently.

Jack Nicholais is going on his third year as the borough's police chief. When he arrived after spending most of his career in Morris County, N.J., Roseto's officers were still using a typewriter to complete their police reports.

''It was almost as if I was walking into a police department 20 years ago,'' he said. ''It was bare bones.''

Nicholais, who's been steadily modernizing the police force, said he still feels like he's policing a small town. Residents call him ''Jack,'' not ''Chief,'' and the most common calls to the department are complaints about drivers blowing stop signs or speeding.

The number of incidents of vandalism is rising, though. Nicholais said there were half a dozen cars vandalized earlier this month -- almost as much property crime as the borough saw all last year.

In the recent spate of vandalism, vehicles were damaged inside and out. Nicholais had to remind people to lock their car doors at night.

The department is also getting involved in investigating more serious offenses, he said, including drug activity.

He said Roseto is still a good place to live, despite more worries about crime.

Residents agreed, saying they still feel safer in Roseto than elsewhere.

''It's not even comparable to some of the bigger cities,'' Ruggiero said. ''You have mischief, and you're going to have that everywhere.''

''Things are changing,'' Trigiani said. ''But it's still a nice town.

''I'll never live away from here.''

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Copyright © 2008, The Morning Call

[Phil Falcone - Site Admin]

Excerpt from 'Outliers'
By Malcolm GladwellMany thanks to Frank Mariano for pointing out this article in USA TODAY
Outlier, noun.
out·li·er
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body

2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.

For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment—until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.

In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans—ten men and one boy—set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.

The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.

In 1896, a dynamic young priest—Father Pasquale de Nisco—took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world—all but unknown by the society around it—and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.

Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto—but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer—this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, 'You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"

Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.

Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said—all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, 'You can have the town council room.' I said, 'Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, 'Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."

The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.

Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."

Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto—a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.

Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41% of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.

If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.

He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.

What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.

"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."

When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were—that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made—on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community—the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with—has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.

In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health.

Copyright © 2008 by Malcolm Gladwell

Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2008-11-17-Outliers_N.h...

[Lynda Matthews]

What an amazing article Phil - thanks for posting it. I of course had heard of this - but there is so much detail here with regards to the study. I am putting together a little binder of my stories - blogs -for my mother for Christmas and I think I will include this article with it.
Lynda