Miss Italy USA Crowned in Connecticut

There are coincidences, and then there are freaky coincidences. This one is borderline.

I was perusing my Italy news alerts this morning when the name of one of the newspapers on the list caught my eye – The Newtown Bee? Really? The paper from the small town in Connecticut where I was born and raised? Seriously? What on earth does Newtown have to do with Italy?!?

So, while no one else will find this interesting, I can’t resist posting it because it’s just too head-shakingly strange not to:

Melania, a junior at Newtown High School, and the daughter of Thomas and Fucsia Fitzgerald, will travel to Milan, Italy, in June to compete with 39 other girls from around the world for the Miss Italy of the World crown. They are the cream of the crop, selected from a starting pool of nearly 7,000 young women around the world.

Miss Italy of the World? What the heck is this competition? The article doesn’t say whether you have to be of Italian descent to compete, though I imagine Melania is – it says she’s spoken Italian at home since she was a toddler, and her mother’s name is Fucsia.

Anyway, it’s just bizarre, that there’s some weird competition for Miss Italy all over the world, and that the US representative comes from the town where I grew up. Okay, okay – I’ll go back to posting things you might actually be interested in now.