JOYFUL MESSENGER
Italian immigrant Pietro Ferraro brought familiar voices to Sharpsburg
Three words came to mind for Pete L. Ferraro while describing what it was like to be the son of Pietro Ferraro: entertaining, fun and stressful.
In 1966, Ferraro’s father, mother and older brother left their home in Italy to settle near the rest of Pietro’s family in Sharpsburg. The ultra-gregarious Pietro quickly established himself as a popular figure in the local Italian community. It helped that he came to the U.S. carrying a slice of home in the form of tapes containing messages from friends and relatives of his family and new neighbors.
Those tapes have been in the Ferraro family’s possession for more than a half century. Pete Ferraro was recently able to digitize them and use those recordings as the jumping off point for his documentary “il Messaggero,” which chronicles his father’s journey from the small town of San Pietro in Guarano to become the unlikely link between Sharpsburg residents and their loved ones in Italy.
“il Messaggero,” which means “The Messenger,” will make its local TV debut Saturday at 10 p.m. as part of WQED’s ongoing “Filmmakers Corner” series.
“I thought it was a unique story that held some small treasures for the Italian American community,” Ferraro, 55, told the Post-Gazette. “This was a great way to get it out there.”
The Sharpsburg of Ferraro’s youth felt “almost like a Little Italy” given how most of his childhood friends were also first -generation American children of Italian immigrants. He’s more introverted than his father was, and he was always in awe of Pietro’s ability to connect with anyone he met.
“He was a unique guy,” Ferraro said of his father, who died in 2014. “I have people reaching out to me all the time now, having seen the film, about how he touched their lives in some way. It was usually something he had done for them or some way he had shown how he cares for people.”
Ferraro mostly specializes in television promotion and commercials. His career has taken him to stations in Cincinnati, Harrisburg, Washington D.C., and Pittsburgh, where he interned at KDKA-TV and spent a
year in WPXI-TV’s promotional department. He currently works as the marketing director for a cluster of stations in the Baltimore area.
This was always a story Ferraro thought would make for a good documentary, but he didn’t have the means to make it until about a year and a half ago. That’s when he received a grant through the Russo Brothers Italian American Film Forum, which is sponsored by Pittsburgh- based Italian Sons and Daughters of America. The “Avengers: Endgame” directors’ grant is awarded to filmmakers interested in exploring the Italian American experience.
Its only stipulation was that Ferraro had to turn around a completed film in five months. With the help of folks in both Pittsburgh and Baltimore, he was able to get “il Messaggero” ready in the allotted time frame. It began playing the festival circuit last fall and is currently available to rent or buy via Vimeo On Demand.
Half the documentary focuses on Pietro and his family during their days in Italy, while the rest zeroes in on their lives in Sharpsburg. Ferraro said he set out to highlight “the actual people on both sides” of his father’s mission, including those in Italy whose voices are heard on the tapes.
That required delving deep into the sociopolitical conditions that led to most of Pietro’s family leaving Italy years before he eventually followed suit.
Ferraro had at his disposal 106 voices featured across about a dozen tapes. Some of the audio needed to be repaired or enhanced during the digitization process, and Ferraro said his mother and older brother were instrumental in helping him translate them. All that work allowed him to surprise a few modern-day Sharpsburg residents with remastered versions of their friends’ and family members’ voices.
“I got their authentic reaction,” he said. “It made me feel just as good as it made them feel. I was happy to do it and that this unique gift my father gave their families, I was able to do it again for their descendants.”
WQED is “really making a dream come true” for Ferraro by airing “il Messaggero” on “Filmmakers Corner.” Producer and host Minette Seate was happy to slot it into the lineup, though she did ask that Ferraro trim about 9 minutes to fit the broadcast window. He said that only “things that wouldn’t affect the story progression” were ultimately removed from the cut that will air Saturday on WQED.
Ideally, Ferraro hopes that “il Messaggero” and his father’s efforts to maintain the ties that bind communities in Italy and Western Pennsylvania will serve as a reminder for Pittsburghers that “we’re all connected and everyone is important.”
“Whether you’re Italian or Polish or whatever nationality you are, we’re all in this thing called life together,” he said. “It’s a nice, feel-good story that I think a lot of people will enjoy just on the merits of what he did.”