Last summer, doing our annual browsing at the packed Italian Pavilion at the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York, we met Maria Teresa Sassano, a businesswoman from Puglia and National Vice President of the Small Industry Committee of Confindustria, the largest industrial organization in Italy (see box to the right). We hung back to talk with her about women’s roles in Italian industry and her personal efforts to promote the internationalization of small and medium-sized Italian companies.