Your family left Southern Italy carrying secrets they never fully explained. This is where you finally find out why
Do you wonder why the language wasn't passed on? Why do your relatives say "there's nothing there anymore" when there still is? Why the old country was spoken of with equal parts love and relief? Most Italian-Americans carry a vague sense that the answers are gone along with the people who knew them. They aren't. Southern Italy is alive, continuous, and waiting. The towns your ancestors left still exist. The churches where they were baptized still stand. The records of their lives are well preserved and surprisingly easy to find once you know where to look. The Italian Heritage Lab is your way in.
Session One: The Italy They Left Wednesday April 23 at 7pm ET — 90 minutes
The history they never taught you. Southern Italy was once one of Europe's wealthiest kingdoms — a Mediterranean crossroads ruled by Greeks, Phonecians, Arabs, Normans, French, Spanish, and the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties. Then Italian unification happened, and everything changed. We'll cover what life in Southern Italy was really like before your family left, what forces made leaving feel like the only option, and why this history has been systematically sidelined for over a century.
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Session Two: Finding Your Family in the Record Wednesday, April 30 at 7pm ET — 90 minutes
Now that you understand the world your ancestors lived in, here's how you find them in it. We'll cover the genealogy tools that actually work for Southern Italian research, how to read Italian civil and church records, how to interpret what you find, and — crucially — how to fill the gaps with historical context when documents don't exist or were never kept. Between sessions one and two, your homework is simple: find one thing. One document, one photograph, one object, one recipe. Bring it to session two.
Session Three: Building Your Family Legacy, Wednesday May 7 at 7pm ET — 90 minutes
What do you actually do with everything you've learned and found? This session is part Q&A, part workshop. We'll talk about how to turn scattered knowledge into something concrete — a document, a recorded conversation, a family history, a letter to your grandchildren — that people will actually read and keep. Maybe you want to plan a trip to visit your ancestral village. You'll leave with a clear, simple next step for your own legacy project.
You're the one in your family who still remembers to ask, and you're starting to panic that the people who know the answers are running out of time
You've always felt that being Southern Italian meant something specific — something different from the Italy of movies and tourist brochures — but you've never had the language or the history to explain exactly what
You want to give your children and grandchildren a real inheritance: not just a name and a dish, but a story they can stand inside and understand
About Danielle Oteri
I'm an art historian, writer, and travel advisor. I'm the host of the podcast Danielle Oteri's Italy, an occasional guest host of the Italian American Podcast, and the founder of Arthur Avenue Food Tours. I attended graduate school in Florence, became an expert on the Renaissance in Naples, and spent 16 years at the Met Cloisters as Program Director of the International Center of Medieval Art. I also served as a professor of art history at Seton Hall University. My original writing has appeared in The Paris Review, BBC Travel, Condé Nast Traveler, and The Independent. My work has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and on the cover of The New Yorker. I created the Italian Heritage Lab because I kept meeting Italian-Americans who felt the urgency to preserve their family stories but lacked the historical framework to do so well. The genealogy tools exist. What's harder to find is someone who can tell you what your ancestors' world actually looked like — and why it matters that you understand it before you try to tell their story.
Reclaim your story and make sure it's never again lost
Have questions? Send an email to [email protected]
$297.00