Behind the Story of My Immigrant Italian Family

The old barn at the Masi farm

April 26, 2025

A few people have asked me if I’ll write a sequel to my debut novel, The Taking. When I wrote the book, I thought that maybe I might write a sequel to it someday. The Taking is a suspenseful story with paranormal elements about a young girl and her father who don’t always get along but who are all that each other has, and together they must confront the unknown. I know there are ways I could continue the story in a sequel. But I had a different idea for my next novel, and that’s what I’m focused on now.

The Chicken Coop

One of the stone walls of the chicken coop they built on the farm

The pictures here are landscapes around the Masi farm in Connecticut. My dad’s grandparents were immigrants from Italy, and the new novel I’m writing is inspired by the spirit of the people in my family and the farm. I think it was about ten years after they emigrated from Italy that they bought the farm. They had a dairy herd, chickens, pigs, and horses, and they delivered milk and eggs to customers seven days a week.

Like immigrants from all over the world have done, they worked hard with real grit to make a life in their new country of America. My great-grandparents went to Pennsylvania first, and my great-grandfather worked as a coal miner. It’s unclear to me how long they lived there. The story I heard was there was an accident—a gas explosion came out of the mine and killed a child, and following that my relatives left there and moved to Waterbury, Connecticut.

There was a large Italian American community in Waterbury, and many of the people in the community were also Aviglianese, like my family; they were from the city of Avigliano or the surrounding area. When my great-grandparents got to Waterbury, they opened up a small grocery store in the neighborhood.

Pretty Lane

The lane from the farmhouse to the barn and the pastures

Eventually, they bought their farm and settled there. During the Depression they gave milk and eggs away to their customers who were needy, knowing they’d probably never pay them. They extended kindness to a solitary and neerdowell man by allowing him to live rent free in a little house on a piece of their property and giving him food from the farm. The man lived there for a long time, until he either died or moved on.

At some point, the town had a plan to make it more difficult for my family and other families to hold onto their farms. The town council passed tax hikes to force the people to sell off their land to a real estate developer. The town wanted to build something there that would bring in more tax dollars.

Looking out at where the orchard used to be

It was the impetus for my family getting into politics. They helped organize people and created a coalition that pushed back, and they were able to stop the punitive taxation the town was trying to impose. They ran for office and were elected to the town council. Years later, the next generation of my dad and his cousin also served on the town council.

A view of the pasture through the open barn door

Many Americans are like me and have ancestors who believed they could make a better life for themselves and their families in the United States, and through faith and fortitude, they succeeded. It’s humbling to me to think about the people who exhibit such courage and determination to become part of the American story.