Group brings together young adults with Italian roots

The next generation of young adults with Italian heritage have found a home in central Ohio at Columbus St. John the Baptist Church.

The church, which was founded in 1898 in Columbus’ Italian Village, has become the meeting place for La Prossima, a group of young adults of Italian descent.

The group was founded in 2023 by Vincenzo Frissora, Andrew Speicher and Angelina Tiberi. La Prossima means “the next,” in Italian.

“That name holds a lot of importance because we feel like it’s our duty, as young people, to carry on that tradition because, if we don’t, it’s lost,” said Speicher, one of the group’s co-founders.

La Prossima welcomes young adults in the Columbus area of Italian descent between the ages of 18 and 30. The group meets approximately once a month in the parish’s Italian Cultural Center, known as Marrapese Hall.

Speicher, a student at Ohio State University studying business, and the co-founders recognized a need for a young adult group to preserve Italian culture. Her and Frissora were involved with an Italian club at Ohio State, Speicher said, but found the club was not fulfilling a need for authentic Italian community.

“It wasn’t super cultural in nature,” he said. “It was more so this kind of get-together – a lot of us play Bocce (an Italian bowling game) and hang out, which is great, but our generation is focused on a lot of other things, and I think Bocce is maybe on the bottom of the list.”

The founders turned to St. John the Baptist, which, Speicher said, is considered to be the center of the Columbus Italian community.

“It’s been around for a long time and the Italian immigrants built that church,” he said. “And so everything about it is very, very authentic.

“It’s a great community that our grandparents and great-grandparents really built up and found as their home, almost like a little Italy. … It holds a lot of nostalgia for a lot of us and our members.”

 The group’s founders decided to hold La Prossima meetings there and rented one of the church’s meeting spaces.

“We thought, what better backdrop to use for our group than St. John’s?” Speicher said. “They have Marrapese Hall there, which is an Italian Cultural Center, they call it, and that was made for the purpose of what our group is doing, (which is) promoting Italian culture and heritage and trying to foster that in our community.”

La Prossima held its first meeting in Marrapese Hall in October 2023. The group met again in November, December and recently held its fourth event – a San Valentino (St. Valentine) dinner – on Feb. 9.

La Prossima’s founders are working to create more events to keep attendance high and members engaged, Speicher said. Several members of the group are Ohio State students who are in Columbus for school, including some from out of state.

Unlike other young adult groups, Speicher said, there is no annual membership fee for La Prossima. Members can attend events as they choose and pay per event. The group has 100 official members, and attendance at meetings has reached approximately 45 people. 

Frissora, a fourth-year student at Ohio State studying human nutrition, is not surprised the group has grown quickly.

“There are younger people who want to learn more about different aspects of Italian culture, and that interest is there,” he said. “There was a need to centralize and aggregate the people, to find a point of reference where they could talk to others of the culture and learn more.”

Unlike previous generations, young adults of Italian descent are spread throughout Columbus and the suburbs. Italians formerly congregated in certain parts of the city, such as Italian Village. 

St. John the Baptist Church offers a centralized place for them.

La Prossima meetings are usually held once per month and sometimes twice a month when there is a holiday to celebrate. Many of the group’s events are centered around baking, cooking or food, which, Speicher said, is central to Italian culture. Marrapese Hall includes a kitchen space.

For the San Valentino dinner, he said, the group prepared a red-wine Italian cake and shared desserts, including Italian Amaretti cookies made with almond flour, egg whites and sugar, and Pignoli cookies, which are almond cookies coated with pine nuts.  

The cost for the dinner was $20 per person, while other events, including those including cooking and baking, have a $10 fee a person. Speicher said they try to keep the cost of meetings affordable because many members, such as students, do not have a steady income.

In November, La Prossima celebrated an Italian Thanksgiving. Each person brought a homemade dish specific to the Italian region of their heritage. Speicher said organizers received positive feedback about the event, and members enjoyed showcasing a family recipe.

The group held a Biscotti-making event in December and baked Italian cookies together. Speicher said the group enjoys bonding over food. 

And as Italian cuisine and cooking bring the young adults together, La Prossima could also introduce many young adults to the Catholic Church. A number of La Prossima members are not Catholic and attending a group meeting at St. John the Baptist might be their first encounter with the Church.

“I do think that our group, especially having all of our events thus far at the church, has exposed them to it,” Speicher said. “It’s a great thing, I think, for them, too. 

“They’re able to relate with it a little bit more because there’s such a cultural aspect to St. John’s that, I think, maybe a lot of people don’t understand or don’t know about until they actually go there. And so, I think that’s something really special that a lot of these people have related to and appreciate it.”

La Prossima could also offer an avenue for individuals who were raised but no longer practicing the faith to re-encounter the Church. The group promotes feast day celebrations taking place at St. John the Baptist Church and members, including those who are not Catholic or do not belong to the parish, are invited to attend.

Speicher said Italian culture and Catholicism go “hand in hand.” Many Italian holidays are Church feast days.

As an example, Italians celebrate the feast of the Epiphany. La Befana (meaning ‘epiphany’ in Italian) is a public holiday in Italy that coincides with the Catholic Church’s feast of the Epiphany celebrated on Jan. 6. 

“We don’t want to force it on people, but what we want to do is introduce them to St. John the Baptist setting and tell them about events like La Befana on the feast of the Epiphany,” Frissora said. “We want to invite them to those events and give them the option to learn about it and live those experiences.”

“We hope that a lot of our members, including people who aren’t necessarily in the church regularly, will come to join us for those things,” Speicher said.

Frissora, who speaks fluent Italian, is a member of St. John the Baptist. His family has belonged to the parish since his Italian grandparents arrived in Columbus, he said. Speicher, who lives in Westerville, said his family attends Westerville St. Paul the Apostle Church.

He said several members of La Prossima grew up attending St. John the Baptist Church with their families. However, living in various suburbs, several Italian families joined a local parish.

“I personally go to St. John’s every Sunday now; that’s where I find myself,” Speicher said. “Having gone there for the past couple of years on my own, I’ve been seeing a lot of people from our group start to attend St. John’s more often, more than the church in the suburb that they live in.

“That’s exciting to see and something that my co-founders and I love. It’s kind of igniting that spark back at St. John’s and bringing that younger community in.”

He said several La Prossima members who grew up at St. John the Baptist reconnected with other young adults they knew from the parish. 

“They’ve enjoyed connecting with people that they may have grown up with but have lost connection over the years or people that they used to see at church all the time,” he said.

“Now, I think with our generation, a lot of them, we live in the suburbs. We don’t all go to St. John’s for church. And so, you’re not seeing these people like you used to. I think people really enjoy gaining that sense of Italian community and identity back in the city. Our group members have loved it.”

Going forward, the group would like to incorporate genealogy into meetings, Speicher said. Several members of the group are second-generation Americans whose grandparents immigrated to the United States from Italy.

He said some members, such as fourth-generation Americans, are not as familiar with their Italian ancestry. The founders want to help those members learn their family history and discover which region of Italy their family originated in.

“Most of the people in the group have origins from the same couple of regions in Italy,” Frissora said, whose paternal grandparents emigrated from Italy’s Abruzzo region.

He said it is important that La Prossima promotes and maintains Italian culture. Right now, many have their grandparents to rely on for Italian traditions and community, but it will not always be that way.

“Once all the nonni (grandparents) are no longer with us, then we lose that sense of family gathering and enforcement of the culture in different ways like through baking, for example, or through their sense of Catholicism,” he said. 

“All the Italian grandmas, they all have statues of the Mother Mary in their house; that’s one example,” Frissora said, as well as pictures of the pope and the Last Supper.

“We live in an area where it’s a lot of English, and the Italian culture has been diffused and dispersed and blended in with everything else, and we want to make it distinct.”

Frissora said he hopes to have Italian business owners speak at La Prossima meetings. He said the group would like to learn how to run an Italian business and they are interested in inviting an owner of an Italian restaurant, clothing brand or car company.

This summer, the group hopes to host an Italian gala in honor of Father Casto Marrapese, who was from Italy and served as pastor of St. John the Baptist Church from 1974 to 1991.

Speicher said the gala could potentially be one of the group’s larger events and open to people outside of the 18-30 age range. He thinks Father Marrapese, who died in 2002, would appreciate La Prossima. 

“He was a big, big, big proponent of the Italian culture and keeping it alive,” Speicher said. “He was a major part of the Italian festival, and the cultural center was actually something that he was able to start, so it's named after him.

“He's a pretty big name in the Italian community here. We want to do something to honor him because we know that he would love the group that we started.”

For more information about La Prossima or to sign up, visit Instagram.com/LaProssimaSocieta and LinkTr.ee/LaProssimaSocieta.