My Talk At an Italian Holiday Program

There's absolutely no excuse for not posting this in advance of the event - let's just say I'm an idiot and leave it at that.  On Sunday, Dec. 7th, 2008, I had the very great pleasure and honor of being a guest speaker for an Italian Holiday Program sponsored by the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University and the Committee for the Preservation of Italian-American History and Culture.  The event was very well attended and I was fortunate to have the Italian Youth Choir warm up the crowd. The kids were wonderful, thanks to their tireless director Monica Bonasso and, of course, their own work ethic and innate talent.  Thanks to Michael Oliverio, Gloria Cunningham, Matthew Vester and Tina Levelle for inviting me and for making the event so special.  It's always an honor to be able to speak about Feast of the Seven Fishes, and our Italian heritiage in general, but especially when I can do it here in north-central West Virginia.  I should also mention there were also several presentations on various Italian provincial holiday cooking traditions by their respective natives that was very enlightening (and hunger-pang-inducing).

Bob Tinnell

Comments

[Alessandro Cagossi]

Dear Bob Tinnell,

Congratulations for the blog, very interesting. I am pleased to have participated Sunday at the meeting in Morgantown. I gave you my script about the Christmas traditions in Emilia-Romagna...or, at least, how the tradition works in my family. If you would like to post my speech in the blog, I would be more than happy. I can also work on it further, if necessary, to make it in a more publishable format.

During the preparation of my short speech, I surfed both Italian and English websites searching for the Italian Christmas traditions, especially those of my region but not only. Incredibly enough, there are not many websites that offer this kind of info. Even searching in Amazon, I could only find the book “Italian American Holiday Traditions: Celebrations and Family Entertainment”. But nothing really grounded on the Italian tradition. As I said during my speech, in Italy there are twenty regions with twenty different traditions, sometimes similar, sometimes very different.

This premise to ask you whether you might be interested to develop something about it. A section of the blog? ...

Probably, Saturday I will visit Fairmont for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. I'm sure you will be around!

Best

Alessandro Cagossi