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 Southern Italy is emerging from years of recession, according to a report released Thursday by industrial employers confederation Confindustria and the SRM research centre. It said that the number of companies active in the south increased by 10,000 in the second quarter of 2016 - the first rise since 2008. 

 We take Italian food for granted. Surrounded as we are by cookbooks, cooking shows, and restaurants, both fancy and humble, featuring the cuisine of everyone’s favorite footwear-shaped country, we often fail to wonder how this wonderful food was passed down to us. So much of French, English, and American food was preserved in cookbooks from an early date — France and England both have unbroken runs of recipe books starting in the 17th century, but Italy was a little different. 

 He was born in 1920 in Rovigno on the Istrian peninsula, a town that now belongs to Croatia. He came from a fishing family and began accompanying his father on the boats when he was just 6, graduating to merchant marine ships by the age of 15. He met his wife, Ida, when he was 19 and she was 15, and the couple immigrated to San Francisco in 1951. 

 Mary Sansone, a 4-foot-11 daughter of Italian immigrants, in the Brooklyn home she and her husband bought in 1956, her headquarters as godmother to liberal candidates she deems deserving.