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Jill Biden, the new first lady with the Italian grandparents. From Gesso to the White House, from Sicily to Washington DC From the balconies of the small town in the province of Messina you can listen to the news constantly tuned in live broadcasts from the United States. In Gesso, a town of 500 Messina residents three hundred meters above sea level from which you can see the Aeolian Islands, they cheered the Democratic candidate Joe Biden, and the reason is clear: precisely the paternal grandfather of his wife, Jill Jacobs, was born here in 1898. His name was Domenico Giacoppo, who later became Dominic Jacobs to avoid misrepresentations, after his arrival in the United States when he was two years old.
Some distant cousins remained in Gesso, like Caterina Giacoppa. 60-year-old housewife “shocked” by interest in her American relative. “I didn’t know she had this important relationship, but now that her husband has become president, I am very happy and excited. I’ll wait for you here, it would be a dream to receive you … ».
A stone’s throw from Caterina’s house is the church of Sant’Antonio Abbate. Here, at the end of the 19th century, Jill Biden’s great-grandfather, Plácido Giacoppa, got married before moving to the United States: he left first, followed by his wife Angela and their four children, Antonio, Natalina, Giovannina, and indeed, Domenico. The Giacoppa arrived, like all other Italian emigrants, aboard a ship that left Naples and reached Ellis Island. There, in Gesso, in the Peloritani Museum, the document certifying the reunification of the Giacoppo family in 1900 is framed. “This certificate attests to the departure of the Giacoppos from Messina – explains Tonino Macrì, young president of the Rinascita Gesso association “We can therefore boast about the origins of Mrs. Jacobs. We encouraged her husband to become president, and now the first thing we will do is invite the first lady to visit her family’s home country.”
Jill Jacobs is Biden’s second wife who, at age 29 and having been a lawyer, ran for Senate: only he and his family thought he could do it, but he was elected. But the joy of the triumph was brief: just before Christmas, his first wife, Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, died in a car accident.
The two men, Beau and Hunter, were seriously injured at the hospital. Then in 2016, Beau, a former Delaware prosecutor and captain in the National Guard, also died of cancer, while Hunter, the youngest, caused him uneasiness and trouble, amid drug addictions and reckless business in countries like Ukraine. and China. bounced off the father with allegations of conflict of interest.
By Jill Jacobs Biden had a daughter, Ashley, with his second wife Jill Jacobs, a teacher at a community college, married in 1977 at the United Nations Church in New York. The two Majors and Champ also belong to the family.
The wife of the newly elected president of the United States prefers to be called Dr. Biden, not only because of her academic degrees, her master’s in English literature and her doctorate in education. But also because Mrs. Biden is still Neila, Joe Biden’s first wife. After the first meeting, on a blind date arranged by Biden’s brother, three years after the tragic accident, in 1977 Jill, who had divorced her first husband Bill Stevenson, known in high school, marries Joe and is becomes the mother of Beau and Hunter, and in 1981 Ashley was born. But tragedy knocked on the Bidens’ door again, when in 2015 the eldest son Beau died at the age of 47 from a brain tumor. It was the death of his son that convinced then-Vice President Barack Obama not to run for the White House in 2016 to give the family the space and time to mourn that terrible pain.
And the 67-year-old former Wilmington public school teacher has always insisted on the centrality of family values, then an English teacher at a Community College, first in Delaware and now in Virginia, underlining the weight of her Italian roots, especially in the last lines of the electoral campaign and in crucial states, such as Pennsylvania, where the vote of Italian Americans is important. «I am a girl from Philadelphia, and I am proud to be part of Pennsylvania’s Italian-American community, “she said at a recent virtual event of Italian-American Democrats mobilized to send Joe Biden and Jill Giacoppa, the last names of great-grandparents who came from Sicily and then they anglicized at Jacobs, White House as the Italian-American First Lady.
«Even if Concetta and Gaetano changed their names, they always brought a piece from Italy.» Jill said. Grew up in Pennsylvania, Jill remembers that every Sunday we would return with our grandparents “for the traditional Italian lunch, spaghetti, meatballs, chops, the house smelled of oregano, basil, fresh tomatoes and garlic, I remember that my grandfather gave us all Italian toast and He said to finish with tarallucci and wine, which means that differences do not matter, we always finish dinner as a family.
“I have wonderful memories of the days I spent in the kitchen with my grandmother, my mother and four sisters, it was in that house where I cooked my first tomato sauce,” recalls Jill Biden who, despite professing a love for cooking, and the family never allowed her husband’s political career, first in the Senate, then in the White House alongside Barack Obama, and now again in the White House race, to hinder her in the classroom. “If we go to the White House, I will continue teaching – he said – it is important, I want people to appreciate teachers and know their contribution.” And it is no coincidence that his speech at the Democratic convention, last summer, wanted to record in room 232 of Brandywine High School where he has taught for years: “Teaching is not what I do, but what I am.”
Last updated: 20:29
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