One of the nice things that Terrasini does is reserve almost every street name for a famous/influential Italian. In addition, there are also five benches, made to look like open books, that are reserved for famous/influential Sicilian artists, but more on that later. I suppose lots of cities in Europe do the same thing with their street names, but it's such a marked difference than the US. Maybe we haven't been around as long, but it may well be that we have a more superficial relationship with history. So, instead, we have an endless series of Mulberry Streets (including where I grew up in Rising Sun, Indiana) or Pine Streets or Cherry Streets, etc. (actually, we'd be lot healthier if we ate as much fruit as our streets names suggest). Anyway, I'm taking note of the street names here in Terrasini on my morning walks, and plan research them bit by bit - and in the process learn more about our new home. One of the streets that I tend to pass along quite a bit is Via Andrea Doria. Now, I always associated the name with the Italian ship that sank in 1956 off the coast of Nantucket when it was rammed by the Stockholm. Of the seventeen-hundred passengers on the Andrea Doria, forty-six died (including five more on the Stockholm). What I didn't know, was that the ship was named after the famous Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria (1466-1560), who was one of the most famous sailors of his age.
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