Originally from Catania, he is 45 years old and has lived in the United States for almost twenty years. He works in the restaurant business and loves to travel the world, but every year he returns to his homeland.
He has lived in the United States for almost twenty years, but for Daniele, a forty-five-year-old from Catania, the saying “wife and oxen from your own country” really applies. It was 2006 when he arrived in Miami at the height of a good number of experiences abroad that began in 1999.
It all started in Catania, where he was born and raised in a respectable family like many others, to which he owes a happy childhood and an adolescence full of adventures, friends and sports.
Everything was normal, in short. After graduating, Daniele began attending the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures in Catania but, after about a year and a half, as much as he loved English – which a few years later would become his language, or almost -, he realized that he didn’t have a great feeling with literature and philosophy.
That phase of change began to make him feel that perhaps in Catania he did not have the right stimuli and, also thanks to an uncle who lived in the United Kingdom with his family, in 1999, the day after he turned twenty, he began his first experience abroad, precisely in Southampton.
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Although it was the city from which the Titanicfor him there was an experience in store with a definitely better ending. For the first time on a plane, Daniele, once landed in the UK, is confronted with a reality very different from the Italian one. He had fun, he worked and met many people, but after 7 months for him the time had come to say goodbye to everyone and return to Italy to live the experience of civil service.
Shortly after, in November 2000, in search of a new stimulus, he decided to confront a reality that was truly serious for him: Londra. In the English capital he spent two years that he remembers as spectacular from all points of view, professional, human, social and even economic, working in his first real restaurant, a high-level place that trained him and gave him the foundations for a career that has now continued for twenty-five years in the world of catering.
It was August 15, 2002 when he returned to Italy, and from there, in the space of four years, he had many experiences and missed others, as always happens in life.
He worked at Disneyland Paris for a short time, then two contracts aboard Princess Cruises cruise ships, reaching up to theAlaska and to the French Polynesiaa three-week vacation between California and Las Vegas, the idea of moving to Australia on a working holiday visa, a quasi-job as a flight attendant for Alitalia… in short, an adventurous life, made up of experiences lived mostly alone.
As is understandable in fact, Daniele’s friends were too close to the family and also a bit mummy’s boys, in some cases too scared, in others too penniless to be able to undertake one of his trips and follow him, in others even more simply they did not cultivate his same curiosity that gave him the right interest to discover other realities outside of Italy.
In 2006, on the occasion of his last contract on ships, through a Sardinian pizza chef that he will meet again in Florida fifteen years later, he receives the contact of a boy from Catania who had moved to Miami after having worked like him on ships. Considering that in the meantime he had also met a girl from Miami, together with his dream of Florida for a while, he is pushed and quite a lot towards the USA from this set of factors.
At the beginning of August 2006 – we understood how much this perhaps represents for Daniele the month of changes and travels – with ticket in hand, two suitcases and a little cash he left and certainly surprised that girl who was waiting for him without any scheduled date.
Miami It was his first city in the United States, where he lived for nine years. It was very easy to settle in, also because having a local person with him, many aspects of daily life were simplified.
He left as a tourist but later decided to enroll in university by obtaining a student visa, and so, two years later, in May 2011, he graduated with a degree in International Business, much to the delight of his parents and siblings, who went to visit him in Miami for the occasion.
Today, thirteen years after graduating and eighteen since arriving in the United States, Daniele is a full-fledged American citizen, married to Rosy, also from Catania because, as I mentioned at the beginning, old sayings are sometimes right, and together they have a thirteen-year-old daughter.
Daniele and Rosy met on vacation in Sicily in 2009 and it is from there that he “imported” her to the USA, as he likes to ironically tell. When Rosy got pregnant they chose together that their daughter would be born fifty meters from the sea of Catania, where their roots are and where they met and fell in love.
Daniele hates the cold and divides his time between life in Floridawhich he continues to consider his home, where he spends about half the year, and then New York. Even the United States does not hold many secrets for him, in fact he has lived in several cities in Florida in addition to Miami, such as Naples and Fort Lauderdale, and then in Aspen in Colorado.
He also continued to travel a lot, making some road trip even two months to discover well forty-six statestoday he only has Hawaii, Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire to visit. He continued to work in the catering which allows him to earn well, alternating periods of more intense work with others in which he manages to carve out some free time to dedicate to his family and his passions.
Food has thus become his world and he could not do anything else, then he does not like to wake up early in the morning, so certainly from the afternoon onwards, with his performance improving, this is the sector that suits him best.
Over the years he has collaborated, always in the dining room, with some of the highest level restaurants, also having the opportunity to come across international stars come Bruce Springsteen, Leonardo DiCaprioMariah Carey, Lionel Ritchie e David Beckhamas well as local personalities such as Bobo Vieri, Fedez and Chiara Ferragni, just to name a few…
In the past he worked for a while as a manager but he realized that that was not his path and in the future, even if he wouldn’t mind, he doesn’t think he will ever have his own restaurant that would end up taking away his time and energy to dedicate to his loved ones.
This choice of life and work in fact allows him to return to Sicily quite often and even for long periods. It is on the island that both he and Rosy have parents, brothers and sisters, grandmother, uncles and cousins, so they return once or twice a year, for several weeks, and sometimes even for a month or two as happened during the pandemic.
Daniele spent the first twenty years of his life in Sicily and here are kept very important memories and affections. It would be impossible not to return whenever he can. His bond with his origins and tradition is expressed in everything he does, it is no coincidence that his daughter grew up bilingual, and indeed does not understand how many children of Italians do not know the language.
Daniele is an atypical Italian transplanted to America: he only drinks espresso, drives only manual cars and not automatic ones, has a wife from the same city as him and at home they only speak Italian so that his daughter grows up immersed in our culture.
In the same way he loves the USA, the house that did not give him birth but that welcomed him anyway. He thinks, in a not too distant “tomorrow”, maybe when his daughter finishes school, of travel more abroad, see places that fascinate him and who knows, maybe live in expat in a nice warm place and not overly expensive like the United States which, obviously, has some flaws…perhaps with a place to manage or retired, to fully enjoy one’s time.
Looking back, Daniele thinks that the United States was his destiny already written, so much so that he arrived there almost without realizing it and, especially considering his travels before landing here, he could have ended up anywhere… as a dreamer and a bit lucky though, he managed to make what he hoped for come true and made the American dream a reality, as well as his story.