Oral history project focused on Italian American women of Centre County

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Maria Truglio grew up in an Italian American family on Long Island, New York. All these years later, she’s using her academic background as the opportunity to explore the lives of women who share her heritage.

Truglio, professor of Italian and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State, recently received funding from the College of the Liberal Arts’ Center for Humanities and Information (CHI) to conduct an oral history project documenting the experiences of Italian American women who live in Centre County. The project is part of the broader CHI-funded “Centre County’s History Otherwise: Narrating and Mapping Brazilian, Hispanic, and Italian Women’s Stories” oral history, led by Judith Sierra-Rivera, assistant professor of Spanish and of Latina/o studies.

“Because so much historical information exists only in people's memories and not in the written record, this study preserves firsthand accounts of events through recorded and transcribed interviews,” Truglio said. “And because I think very generally women’s stories are less often told, we wanted to create a space to get those voices a place to be heard.”

Over the course of the academic year, Truglio said she hopes to interview a dozen or so women of Italian American lineage. She’s also documenting photos and other cherished family memorabilia that along with the interviews — available in print, audio and video — will be preserved on a website accessible to students and faculty, as well as the public.

To help her carry out the project, Truglio is collaborating with Jennifer Isasi, director of the Digital Liberal Arts Research Initiative and assistant professor of digital scholarship, and student intern Alexis Wilson, an Italian major and Paterno Fellow.

Truglio said the idea for the project percolated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when human connection was hard to come by and she and other faculty members were thinking of ways to “build bridges and stronger links with the local community.”

“I was thinking about these two courses I teach — 'Italian 131,' which is the gen-ed intro to Italian American culture, and 'Italian 485,' the upper-level seminar on Italian American culture,” Truglio said. “The courses talk about some places in Pennsylvania with big Italian American populations, like Rosetto and Jessup — these are places some of my students come from. We also have Italian Americans from right here in Centre County. So, I thought, why not hear their stories and integrate their life experiences and perspectives into our understanding of Italian American history and culture?”

A trained literary scholar accustomed to working with texts, Truglio received oral history training through a workshop at the University of California at Berkeley and secured all her necessary institutional review board clearances needed to conduct human subject research.

So far, Truglio has interviewed two women for the project: a Bellefonte resident originally from Valley Forge and Andrea E. Allio, an advanced assessment consultant for Penn State Outreach who grew up in Endicott, New York. Truglio has two more interviews scheduled and is currently seeking additional participants. 

Allio said she relished the opportunity.

“I love talking about my background,” she said. “When you meet people of Italian ancestry, you find you immediately have something in common. It creates this immediate connection and comfort level.”

Truglio conducts the interviews on Zoom, which ensures an audio and video archive and produces a written transcript that the team then corrects. She also goes into the women’s homes to document family photos and heirlooms.

She said she's found the women’s stories to be invigorating — and inspiring.

“The woman from Bellefonte I spoke to talked about being one of 10 siblings, and her grandmother was one of 17 siblings,” Truglio said. “She had memories of growing up and having 40 people at the dinner table for any given meal and remembered her parents’ generation speaking Italian, but wanting her generation to learn English.

“Hearing these stories, these little light bulbs go off in my mind, just from my own experiences,” she continued. “And learning new things, like someone raising the chickens they ate or working in a shoe factory — that overlay of the commonalities and differences has been very exciting for me. Just really fundamentally seeing ways in which, even in 2025, that sense of being Italian American is still so meaningful to people.”

It's a sentiment Allio certainly can relate to. The State College resident discussed with Truglio the many heartwarming memories she has of her upbringing in Endicott, which was heavily settled by Italian immigrants who came to work in the area’s shoe factories during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Allio grew up among countless aunts, uncles and cousins on her maternal grandmother’s side of the family, who came from the southern Italian city of Bari. The family was so close-knit that they shared a single pizzelle iron to make the thin, waffle-like Italian cookie. She also recalled the annual Fourth of July picnics that drew upwards of 200 people and the blissful Sundays she spent making homemade gnocchi with her grandmother.

“One of the things I shared with Maria was how much love I received,” Allio said. “When you grow up with something that makes you who you are, there’s something almost celebratory to be able to talk about it. I think Italians are just proud, naturally. It’s embedded in who you are.”

When Truglio visited Allio’s house, they unpacked Allio’s mother’s wedding gown and looked at old photos. It makes for a very emotionally resonant experience, Truglio said.

“What I’ve been hearing certainly aligns with the scholarship and literature I’ve read; it’s just so different to talk to a flesh-and-blood person and hear it directly from them and see the emotions they link to those memories,” Truglio said. “When these women talk about their memories, clearly it’s very emotional for them. Their Italian American identity really shapes how they see themselves and who they are, even now decades later as they’re living in different communities.”

Truglio intends to launch the project’s website next summer. She said she would like to incorporate it into the Italian American culture courses, with students drawing from the audio and visual material to create story maps and timelines, and to reflect on the connections between the oral histories and the material they’ve read in class.

“My hope is that this will be a positive resource for students and anyone in the community — and a great opportunity for the narrators to reflect on their own experiences and their own lives, and maybe to look at the recordings of the other women and feel like they’re part of a community,” Truglio said. “I’m so excited to be doing this and meeting these women and hearing their stories. I’m eager to see it all come to life.”

For Allio, participating in the project was an honor.

“It makes you feel good about your background, because someone cares about it and wants to record it and have it live on somewhere,” she said. “It’s a great feeling to know I can contribute to that, I guess because of how much joy and comfort it gives me. I feel so fortunate that I’m Italian American. It’s my identity.”