Today in Italian news …

Well, it looks like my daughter will have to be the second woman of Italian-American descent to go into space. Crap! (Congratulations to Lisa Caputo Nowak.)

In other news, the battle of the European viticultural powerhouses will be staged on Sunday. Viva Italia! Screw France like they were the Gaul-toys of the Roman Empire!

Eleven months ago I received the results of my participation in The Genographic Project, the National Geographic-IBM partnership to help complete the map of genetic diversity that accounts for humankind’s migration around the world. Since then I’ve been contacted by lots of people also involved in the project who, presumably, are googling M172, the name of mutation that we share. My patrilineal genealogical line intersects the genetic data in southern Italy. But the members of my extended “family” (according to comments on this site and private e-mail) live in Iran, Hungary, India, and Croatia. Amazing to even feel a shred of familial relation to these perfect strangers.

And lastly, the Little Italy, Chicago entry on Wikipedia is but a stub. This is criminal. Or rather, the fact that I don’t have time enough to flesh it out is criminal. I owe it to my grandfather’s stomping ground to edit this, no? Must do this. Must.