“I thought all those fireworks were for me.” Danny Cecchino arrived in New Jersey on July 4, 1971, as fireworks lit up the American sky. He didn’t know the country was celebrating Independence Day. “I thought they were welcoming me,” he says with a laugh.

He would spend more than half a century building a life in America. But the village his family had left behind — Castelpetroso, tucked into the mountains of Italy’s Molise region — never stopped being part of his story.

Today, Cecchino is working to keep the village alive in the memories of generations who have never known it firsthand. Through an association that brings together emigrants and their descendants, he is helping younger Italian Americans rediscover Castelpetroso, its traditions and the family histories that connect them to it.

For years, he says, younger members of the community seemed to have little interest in the customs their parents and grandparents had carried across the Atlantic. They had gone into “a kind of hibernation.” Now, he sees them “beginning to wake up.”

Featured in an episode of Rai’s television series *Radici d’Italia, Castelpetroso is where Cecchino’s family story began, as did those of hundreds of other emigrants.

A sanctuary that bridges the Atlantic

At the heart of that connection stands the Sanctuary of Maria Santissima Addolorata, the religious landmark overlooking Castelpetroso. For generations of emigrants and their descendants, it has remained a place of faith, family memory and belonging.

The bond is visible inside the sanctuary, where an organ donated by Castelpetroso emigrants in New Jersey stands as a testament to their attachment to the village. Cecchino remembers watching the sanctuary take shape, with his father among those who helped build it.

“I saw it being built. My father worked on it, too. It means a great deal to us,” he says.

Cecchino and the 14 members of his association are carrying that commitment forward through fundraising and community events. Their aim is to bring emigrants and their descendants together and encourage younger generations to take an interest in the traditions their families brought with them.

The sanctuary also draws pilgrims from across Italy and beyond. A path leads to the site associated with the reported apparition of the Virgin Mary, passing seven stations along the way. A nearby spring is associated with accounts of miraculous healings.

“More than 100,000 people visit each year,” says Don Fabio Di Tommaso, the sanctuary’s rector. The site has also welcomed Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis.

For emigrants, the sanctuary is more than a pilgrimage destination. It is a shared point of reference for those who stayed and those who left — a place where family history and faith converge.

A village marked by history

Castelpetroso lies between the valleys of Boiano and Carpinone, in the Apennines of Molise, Italy’s second-smallest region. Surrounded by mountains, it is a village of stone houses, winding streets and family histories shaped by emigration.

One of the village’s historic buildings is a palace associated with the family of filmmaker Sergio Leone, the Italian director celebrated for his influential Westerns. Its imposing entrance dates to the Bourbon era, while openings in the walls are said to have served as firing positions during an attack by brigands in 1861. Other architectural details, including symbols carved above a doorway, may point to secret meetings of the Carbonari, a network involved in Italy’s struggle for unification.

Some features of the village may point to even older origins, with local interpretations suggesting a possible Samnite presence in the area.

Like much of southern Italy, Castelpetroso was shaped by the mass emigration of the 20th century. Families crossed the Atlantic in search of work and opportunity, settling in the United States and Canada. Some never returned; others came home after years abroad, while their descendants maintained ties through visits and family associations.

The ancient Pescasseroli-Candela tratturo, a trail once used to move flocks between mountain pastures and the plains, recalls an older tradition of travel and seasonal migration. Today, the routes are different, but leaving and returning remain part of Castelpetroso’s story.

Recipes that preserve a way of life

Local heritage survives in the kitchen, too. One traditional dish, sciuscelle e ciabotta, offers a taste of the region’s rural cooking. The ciabotta is a vegetable stew made with peppers, zucchini, celery, onions and tomato passata, sometimes enriched with sausage. The sciuscelle, made from eggs and cheese, are spooned into the simmering sauce, where they cook until set.

"The dish reflects a tradition of self-sufficiency, built around garden produce and simple recipes meant to feed the whole family", says Clementina, a local cook. Pork fat, known as sugna, was another staple of the traditional kitchen.

These recipes are more than a record of what people ate. They tell the story of a way of life in which families made use of what they grew and raised, passing their cooking traditions from one generation to the next.

The road back home

For Cecchino, the challenge is to ensure that Castelpetroso’s story does not end with the generation that emigrated. "My association brings people together around shared memories and helps younger members understand that their family history is not simply a story about leaving. It is also about what they carried away and what has endured", he says.

That inheritance is kept alive through the sanctuary, traditional recipes, family gatherings and customs that younger generations are beginning to rediscover.

Across the Atlantic, Castelpetroso lives on in the food families cook, the songs they recognize, the stories they tell and the places they still feel compelled to visit.  Each journey renews a connection that distance and time have never quite erased. In Castelpetroso, the road out has never entirely severed the road back.

*Radici d’Italia is a Rai television series produced as part of the “Roots Tourism” initiative promoted by Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU program.