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Ascoli Piceno –
A Place of Return

This work was made in Ascoli Piceno, Italy, in 2011 and 2012.

My earliest experience of the world was Italian. I grew up just west of Chicago’s Humboldt Park, in a neighborhood where the storefronts, food, language, gestures, and people all seemed to have been carried over from Italy intact. The only thing that gave the place a hint of being American was the currency.

I spoke Italian. I said my prayers in Italian. I ate and drank it. In my heart, it was Italia.

When I was six, my family moved to a less homogeneous neighborhood. The shift was abrupt. I went from all things Italian to almost nothing Italian. My English grew stronger, my childhood Italian began to fade, and I started translating for my immigrant parents, writing checks for them and carrying responsibilities that made me feel older and heavier than I should have.

For many years, I turned away from my history, my roots, and parts of my own authenticity. It was how I adapted. It was how I coped. It was how I tried to Americanize.

Over time, I began to understand what I had tried to bury. I often felt suspended between identities, not fully American and not fully Italian. Then I discovered that Italian citizenship could pass through bloodline. Receiving my Italian passport gave formal shape to something I had already begun to feel: my connection to Italy was not symbolic. It was real.

Ascoli Piceno called me there.

I arrived to photograph the city, its history, its streets, its stone, and the feeling I experienced inside it. But the deeper work was not only photographic. Ascoli became a place of recognition. It felt less like a destination than a return.

I believe each of us may have a place on Earth where the gravitational pull feels slightly lighter. A place where movement becomes easier, where serendipity feels less like an aberration, where something in us feels seen, energized, and loved.

For me, that place is Ascoli Piceno.

What the city taught me is that the feeling I found there was not created by the city. It was already within me. Ascoli’s role was to reignite that understanding, to let me remember it, and to show me that the feeling remains available to me always, regardless of where I am standing.

identity, memory, belonging, and return.