By Andrew and Susan Edwards
Mark’s story starts in the streets of Kansas City in a neighbourhood populated by immigrant Sicilians and Neapolitans. He was born to a father of Sicilian origin and a mother whose family came from Puglia. Despite the criminality he witnessed in his hometown, Mark’s family guided him down a path that avoided the temptations of easy money, fighting the facile stereotyping faced by many families whose relatives hailed from southern Italy. He admits that he can’t quite pin-down his feeling of being Sicilian. Despite a lifetime of reading about the island, his first visit was delayed until he was sixty, but it was a visit that would have him yearning for Trinacria whenever he put pen to paper or film to camera. The truth of this is to be found within us all; we are all immigrants from somewhere, however far removed, and to deny that is part of the problem we face as humans in the complex global world of the twenty-first century. Mark has chosen to embrace his family’s past and discover more. READ MORE
markspano.org 