Town Ambassador Award to Deborah Caponera for her love for Fumone and her promotion around the world.
According to Wikipedia, New York has 8,399,000 inhabitants and Fumone has 2,044. A few orders of magnitude less but both have charm to spare, and were able to win the heart of Deborah Caponera.
But let's start from the beginning.
How did she come to happily celebrate her 50th birthday in Fumone?
As you immediately understand from the surname, Deborah has clear Italian origins and in particular from Fumone in the beautiful area of Ciociaria south-east of Rome. A truly magical territory that was the centre of history even before the birth of the Roman Empire.
We can say that Deborah is the historian of the family, the one who goes around asking about their ancestors and has had to discover several mysteries.
Her great-grandfather Vincenzo Caponera had arrived in America in the early 1900s and for some reason had moved to Connecticut where he may not have found the dream he wanted and had to work hard to integrate into the community.
In fact, he never wanted to tell his story and made sure that his children grew up pure Americans forgetting their Italian roots. He married a woman of Irish descent who fought in the family to join this strange Italian emigrant.
Perhaps also for this reason Vincenzo had abandoned every Italian tradition trying to integrate himself totally into the American lifestyle and perhaps his wife's Irish traditions. And everything was lost until the arrival of the fourth generation.
Then a whole series of sons who continue the surname Caponera and continue to live in Connecticut and marry American women right up to Deborah, whose mother descended directly from one of the first pilgrims who arrived in America with the Mayflower.
Actually, her mother and her father’s mother (her grandmother) both have ancestors that go back to the first pilgrims. So, she has early American roots from 3 out of 4 sides of my family tree.
In her journey backwards, Deborah always had in mind her strange surname which is a bit difficult to pronounce and she began her journey of her DNA, going back to a small Italian town.
Fumone is on the top of a hill with a medieval castle and the highest hanging gardens in Europe. The castle was the prison of a pope and also has its own mystery with a ghost roaming its rooms. The village is still all held within its ancient medieval walls.
Due to its position it has been a lookout post since the Roman period and from here the connecting roads with the south were controlled. Its name derives precisely that when you saw the smoke signals (‘fumo’ means smoke) from the castle it meant problems for everyone.
So, 7 years ago after a bit of research, Deborah arrived at Fumone's name and did a search on the internet.
Already at the first image of the village of Fumone it was 'love at first sight'.
It takes your breath away. And she immediately proposed to her husband Greg to spend their next vacation in this Ciociaro village.
The first image was on the site of Lisa Eagles, a beautiful English woman who for love had moved to Fumone years before and opened a B&B. Lisa has also been involved in the administration of Fumone and because of her knowledge of Italian life she constitutes an intercultural bridge for all those who want to enter into the Italian spirit.
In fact, to get to know Italy in all its thousands of facets born from this incredible history which dates back at least three thousand years ago (and we never forget anything), help is needed.
Otherwise we remain on a superficial layer and lose the most beautiful part of Italy, its intangible heritage made up of social relations.
And we come to 2015, when Deborah and Greg decide to come to Italy and spend a day in Fumone and then go to Rome.
They expected to see women dressed in black with low eyes and instead found themselves in a sunny town that welcomed them warmly from the moment they parked the car just outside the walls of the village.
The first person they met was Lisa who immediately led them to their home where they met an elderly gentleman who had been a friend of her great grandfather. A sculptor who immediately invited them to enter his home.
Then Lisa, word of mouth, and Facebook did the rest.
A distant cousin of hers saw that she was in Fumone and brought the whole family home from vacation to offer her a lunch. And what a lunch!
The whole extended family was there, practically half Fumone.
An unforgettable experience that changed her way of seeing life. And even when she returned to America, where she lives in Brooklyn and teaches graphic design at the university, she shed a bit of the Italian lifestyle.
And now she has become 'obsessed' with Fumone and can't wait to go back. And it is time to create even stronger links between young people from Fumone and New York to bring the best of the two towns to life and create new bonds.
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