Italian-American Herald - September 2024

Coming to America was the foundation Sal Lapio has built upon since 1967
By Ken Mammarella
Sal Lapio is taking it easy now, heading
to work at 7 a.m. and heading home midafternoon, a sharp contrast to when he was running a gas station that was open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. six days a week.
Two things justify the new routine. He’s 79. And, as the founder of Sal Lapio Homes, he’s the boss.
Yet, he still goes to work five days a week and doesn’t want to hang around his four- bedroom contemporary, which, of course, he built. “No way I can stay here,” he said. “It feels like jail.”
Lapio embodies the classic immigrant story. He moved to the United States in 1967 from Paternapoli, a small Campanian town east of Naples, “where there was not too much work, and the family had no money.” The U.S. promised “progress,” he said.
And progress he did. “I think the whole story of him coming to America is pretty
See SAL LAPIO - page 7
The many miracles of San Gennaro
Three times each year, the faithful of Naples wait for his blood to liquify
THE CHEF’S PERSPECTIVE Squash soup:
A spoonful
from the past
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SEPTEMBER 2024
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The Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro in the Cathedral of Naples holds the ampoules of the blood of San Gennaro.
By Jeanne Cannavo
Three times each year the faithful of Naples pray for “the Miracle of the Blood” on the first Sunday in May, on Sept. 19 when they celebrate their patron saint San Gennaro and again on Dec. 16 which is the anniversary of the 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. During these sacred events prayers are offered for the blood in San Gennaro’s
reliquary to liquify from its solid state to fulfill the belief that this will protect them from adverse events.
San Gennaro (Italian for Janarius) was born around 272 A.D., near Benevento. According to church records which document miracles attributed to men and women canonized by the Roman Catholic church, Januarius was born to a rich patrician family. He became a priest in his
local parish at the age of 15 during a time when the area was still strongly pagan.
When Januarius was 20, he became the Bishop of Naples. He was also a friend to Juliana of Nicodemia and Deacon Sossius of Misenum, an important naval base of the Roman Empire in the Bay of Naples whom he met during his studies.
See SAN GENNARO - page 4
Fictitious sleuth hunts truffles just as easily as she hunts clues
By Al Kemp
Delaware native Tess Rafferty was vacationing on the Italian island of Ischia when she remarked to her husband that the people around them seemed straight out of an Agatha Christie novel.
“I thought someone should write that,” she said. “And then I thought that someone
should be me.”
And that was the birth of Rafferty’s
stylish, high-living sleuth Kat Kelly, who has previously appeared in “Under the Tuscan Gun,” “The Red, the Fed and the Dead,” and “To Lie in the Sun.”
This year Rafferty brings readers more
See RAFFERTY - page 8
Tess Rafferty: Delaware native and Italophile.
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Vol. 11 / No. 9
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