“Roots breed culture and luxury.” Giuseppe Stevio, Mayor of Carlintini (Syracuse), said yesterday, at the conclusion of the marathon that began last Friday with a meeting with the mayor of the US city of Omaha, Jan Stuthert, to work on the Nebraska Center twinning, and ended. With the festivities of the “common patroness”, Saint Lucia. Among other things, he returned two years after the epidemic.
Stevio recalled how Giuseppe Salerno, the first Carlentine immigrant, arrived in Omaha in 1893, thirty-five years after the city was founded. And in the early years of the twentieth century, already four thousand villagers arrived. Thus, the descendants of these immigrants today amount to seventy thousand of the total population of half a million.
This is also one of the reasons why the two cities made the twinning, which had already begun earlier with a trip to America, made by Stevio himself last July, who then said: “Visiting the Omaha cemetery and reading all those Sicilian names confirmed what I thought .and added that our society has erased from memory its American children, who are so proud of their Carlinian ancestry, that they have sacredly preserved the values and traditions bequeathed to them.”
Beginning with those in Santa Lucia: the 89th anniversary was celebrated in his honor in Nebraska during the trip of the mayor, who in those days began to work on twinning several Italian-American associations and with his colleague Jan Stuthert. Then, last weekend, the latter re-visited and remained a guest of the Carlintini with one hundred Omaha natives.
“In Nebraska – recalls Stevio – we also established relationships with both universities and the Chamber of Commerce and with very big entrepreneurs.”
Eleonora Formica, president of the Carlentini-Omaha Association, also attended: “Twinning represents the only possibility for this area of Sicily to enjoy a large number of visitors. It is a matter of changing the economy by focusing on the so-called roots tourism, calling here the sons and grandsons or great-grandchildren of immigrants who decided to visit the village from which the grandparents and great-grandparents left. New projects will center around this idea, such as book production in English and Italian, genealogical research, and much more.”
shroud and display. Among them is singer and entrepreneur Carmelita Troya Nanvito de la Guardia, Vice President of the Sicula Italia Foundation, one of the promoters of twinning spoke. Having moved to Omaha when she was just four years old, Carmelita fulfilled her dream last Saturday: to go home and translate, in the field, a song she wrote specifically for Carlintini. Which opened the evening which culminated in the performance of another Carlini singer, Esther.
“My parents have always called me – he said – to think positively. I don’t know how to express the feelings I have inside my soul. I wrote The Sicilian Hearth and it’s finally time to put myself at the piano and sing it.”
“A moment of great emotion – concluded Stevio -, even if it is louder than ever before relating to the immersive exhibition that took place on Friday evening at the Carlentinese Plexus of Carmine and was organized by Circolo Leontinoi. Watching images of Carlintini Live and Love, written by Ciro Meliti and directed by Alfredo Martinez and are Collecting vintage photos, I was able to touch the feelings of the Omaha and Carlintini communities, once again in front of those unpublished photos that tell the tale of those who left and those who stayed.”
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