Homelands

I began collecting Italian stamps off family letters in the basement of my great-grandmother’s home on Staten Island, New York, when I was in grade school.

My great-grandmother, Maria Zanussi, left her hometown in Friuli, Italy, during the vicious but little-known campaigns in northern Italy during World War I. Although my great-grandfather, Giovanni Roperti, returned to Italy several times in his life, she never did. Most of the letters I found in the basement dated to the 1950s and had stamps from Italy’s long-running Siracusana definitive series. They featured an allegory of Italy as a woman with a turreted crown, taken from an ancient coin discovered at Syracuse in Sicily. The discovery sparked a fascination with that series in particular and Italian stamps in general, and I still collect them. I only wish that I had more of the covers intact—especially the ones franked with commemorative stamps, which are harder to find on cover—and that I had paid more attention to the letters and what they could have told me about my great-grandmother and my Italian relatives.

Those letters, the stamps, and her relatives’ occasional visits to the U.S. were my great-grandmother’s only connection to the land she never saw again and sometimes seemed to want to forget. They are my connection, too, as I have never been to Italy, but I have learned much about its history, art, and culture from its stamps.

-Daniel Piazza