The other day I was on KNCO radio with Tom Fitzsimmons interviewing Homer Nottingham and me. Homer who is a locally famous teacher of Tai Chi and Qigong. The show was about “Blue Zones” which are places around the world where people live long and active lives.
.. often to 100.
I happened to mention a story about Roseto, Italy and descendants who moved to America and lived unusually long and happy lives. Tom was interested and I said that I would follow up with an article in The Union. Well.
...
Here it is. Old Roseto One hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills there is a medieval village named Roseto Valfortore. For centuries the residents of Roseto worked in the marble quarries or cultivated the fields for the Saggese family which was the great landowner of the area.
It was a hardscrabble life for the townsfolk who were desperately poor, barely literate and without much hope for economic betterment. In 1882 after hearing that America might offer a better life, ten men and one boy from Roseto set sail for New York. After spending some time in Manhattan’s Little Italy, they wandered ninety miles west and found work in the slate quarries near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania.
The next year fifteen more Roseto residents left for Bangor. In 1894, twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America leaving their village almost abandoned. New Roseto The Rosetans began buying up land on a rocky hillside next to the town of Bangor.
They built clustered two-.