0In the 1950s, a New York radio station created ‘La grande famiglia’, a program for Italian Americans sponsored by a tomato company. The mechanism was simple, but ingenious: in exchange for ten labels as proof of purchase, a correspondent would go and record the voices of relatives in Italy. In a world without a telephone, the thirteen seasons of the show represented, for many people, the only link between their loved ones and their homeland. In 2022, Cristiano, the author of the podcast, discovered that in America there were thousands of records with recordings of the broadcast, sent as a souvenir by the radio station to the participating families. Thus began a search that reconnected the threads of personal and collective memories, starting from an extraordinary sound archive.“Brooklyn Records” is dedicated to a family originally from Carunchio (Chieti), with the voices of some Carunchio (CH) residents of the time, a new podcast by RAI on Italian American migration. Joseph Sciorra, folk scholar and director of the Calandra Institute New York has the memory discs of a broadcast with the voices of his maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother, Emilio and Filomena. Both lived between Italy and America, Gerbi the host of the show recorded them in the early 1950s in their respective towns in Lazio and Carunchio (Chieti) Abruzzo. Their journeys tell the story of the dynamics experienced by many first-generation immigrants.We asked and Rai kindly gave us the transcript for the podcast which we ran through Deepl for English speakers to read. We suggest reading it whilst listening to the podcast, the sounds and music from the 1950s and fascinating commentary are worth a listen to!Listen to the Podcast >Read the English Transcript > Carunchio. From Touring Club Italiano, 1948. Photo credited to Roasio. Author: Sam DunhamSam is a very lucky midlife 'mamma' to A who is 13 and juggles working as a freelance SEO copywriter & teaches IGCSEs at Istituo Cristo Re in Rome. She is the founder of the Life In Abruzzo Cultural Association, co-founder of Let's Blog Abruzzo and 'English in the Woods' initiative.Protecting Abruzzo’s Charm,Empowering Generations to Come:Grow Life in Abruzzo!Support our not-for-profit cultural association via GoFundMe Donate now FREE NEWSLETTER Leave this field empty if you're human: