The Tricolore Italiano lights up Niagara Falls

NIAGARA FALLS – Like other Canadian Italian “institutions”, the Corriere Canadese celebrates June as the month in which those citizens with our common history and heritage are singled out for their contribution to the development of this [our] country’s history and achievements. We revel in the publicizing the manifestations that effectively say: “we’re here too; and we are not apologetic about having made this a better place for ourselves and our neighbours!”.

Why not? Next month we celebrate Canada and our experience as Canadians. If the hype, spin and threats to our sovereignty are as they are depicted to be, the Canada will need the type of people unafraid to make sacrifices, willing to “roll up their sleeves and demonstrate their prowess in fashioning ambition and bringing it to reality. That would be the Italian immigrant experience everywhere.

Yesterday, the Consulate General of Toronto, via the initiative of its Head, Luca Zelioli, hosted a unique form of “flag raising” in a historied part of Canada – the Niagara Peninsula; more specifically, on Niagara Falls, one of the world’s great natural wonders. Imagine, we “planted our flag” on the roaring waters of the Niagara River as it pours 700,000 of liters of water – every second – from the Upper Great Lakes fleetingly into Lake Ontario and subsequently through the St. Lawrence River and into the Atlantic Ocean.

The electricity that energy marshals is enough to power the industrial and residential power needs of the 100 million inhabitants in the Great Lakes’ basin of the Northeast USA and Ontario. That same electricity emitted by twenty-one Xenon lights (each producing more than 390 million peak beam candlepower – 8.190 trillion pbc) illuminates the Falls every night from dusk to midnight.

Yesterday for 30 minutes, thanks to the tower keeper Eugene Pellerin, a native francophone of Iroquois and Huron descendancy, Sara Escarraga of Italian and French heritage born in Colombia, and, Luca Zelioli Italy’s foremost Diplomat in Ontario, Manitoba and Nunavut, an electric Italian flag became a part of Nature’s Niagara Falls. An area of ​​the province where Italians are numerically one of the most important communities.

Here below: the Italian flag lights up Niagara Falls; the Publisher of Corriere Canadese Hon. Joe Volpe with Sara Escarraga and the Consul Generale Luca Zelioli; Eugene Pellerin (photos provided by Sara Escarraga and Eugene Pellerin)

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