Plati - Beautiful Village, Beautiful People - Tracking the T's, On the Road in Italy- EP7

Upon my retirement Terri and I decided to travel as much as possible while we were still able to do so. The Covid pandemic had other plans but we were fortunate to have been able to move about freely for several years beforehand. While there remains a limitless list of places to go and things to see throughout the world, we concentrated our travel to many of Italy's cities and small villages as well as the historical sites throughout most of its regions both north and south and in between. When asked to pick a favorite location it is truly difficult to choose one over any other. Every region of the country has beauty and interesting chracteristics in its own right and the food and wine of course speaks for itself no matter where you happen to be. But as the offspring of parents who were both raised in Calabria, I cannot help but have a special place in my heart for the landscape, the history, the food and above all, the warmth and hospitality of the people who call this region of southern Italy home. Although my father was born and raised in Calabria, my mother as the youngest child of seven ironically returned to the homeland of her parents when her mother tragically perished in a home fire in upstate New York. It was here in Plati that she and her siblings grew up, a small Mediteranean village at the foot of the extremely rugged, yet beautiful Aspromonte mountain range in southern Italy between the Tyrannian and Ionian seas.

In and around the engagement of a new world war in Europe, my American born mother returned to the states and specifically to Pennsylvania with several of her siblings. It was here that she would later be connected to her future husband and my father through an older sister of his who had earlier emigrated to America - from Plati, the same small Italian village not only a world away but one from which my mother as an American born citizen just happened to be raised herself!

Another transatlantic voyage later witnessed my mother return to the adopted home of her childhood in Plati to marry my father which several of the clips captured on film many years ago help document in this video. Our personal experience in discovering the homeland of my parents and ancestors was made possible by several of my cousins who accompanied us in our travel and who introduced us to residents and neighbors of Plati that opened up their hearts and homes to us on each and every occasion we have visited. These are the most beautiful, gracious and welcoming people in the world to whom we owe a great debt of gratitude and now consider a part of our FAMILY!!