By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

VENICE, Italy — Ciao!

We RicheBurgers — that’s my wife Mary Riche and I — flew out of Des Moines Friday morning, out of Minneapolis Friday afternoon, out of Amsterdam at 9:15 a.m. Saturday, and then landed just before noon Saturday in our destination of Venice. A bus from the airport and a vaporetto, or bus-boat on the water, brought us to the garden apartment we will inhabit for five days — maybe 30 yards away from this city’s Grand Canal.

Our 16-day trip is actually a triple header.

 

 

We are celebrating our third wedding anniversary, which was earlier this week. We realize how precious time and health are at our ages (78 and 77). We are devoted to making the most of this blessed time we have together. We have a very good life.

We are also visiting our friend Amy Namowitz Worthen, the well-known artist and an “independent scholar” (what a title!), who for more than 20 years has divided her time between homes in Des Moines and in the famous northeastern Italian city of Venice.

And we are doing a form of what I’ve nicknamed “the Kyle & Sharon Krause Italian Roots Tour,” visiting the two wineries and “luxurious eco-conscious hotel” the Iowa business leaders own in northwestern Italy. Our original plan had also included attending games of the Krauses’ professional soccer teams, Parma Calcio men and women, but the teams’ schedules didn’t work with ours.

I will be writing columns about all this, as time allows, so stay tuned in here on Substack and on our website www.Offenburger.com. We plan to be busy, seeing and learning all we can in Venice, Florence, the Piedmont Region of the northwest, and Milan.

 

Leaving the Des Moines International Airport.

 

We are doing this at a time when we Iowans have a growing awareness of Italy, and more interest in it, too.

Part of that is because of Kyle Krause, now 62, who for years led the Krause Group’s Kum & Go convenience store chain until selling it in 2023.

He’s always had “an affection for Italy,” he relayed in a message, originally because his great-grandparents on his mother’s side of his family came from the Palermo area of Sicily, in the country’s south.

Much later, “there’s been a family home in the region” of Italy “for a long time.” He became engaged to his wife Sharon, who is also an Iowa native, in Italy. They married there. Two of Kyle’s sons have married there. He “prefers Italian fashion, drives an Italian car, and is committed to our Italian businesses and future growth in the region.” His investments there have grown significantly since his first one, his purchase of a historic winery, in 2015.

Krause’s love of soccer is well-known. He has been involved in ownership of the minor league Des Moines Menace for more than 20 years. It’s been fun watching him build the Parma Calcio teams in Italy since he became the majority owner in 2020. And most of you know he’s now promoting a $90-plus million “Pro Iowa Soccer Stadium and Global Plaza” development in downtown Des Moines. Count me among those who think it’s a good, exciting idea.

But the Kyle Krause project I’ve most admired is the decision — largely his, I think — to contract famed Italian architect Renzo Piano to design and oversee the building of the fabulous Krause Gateway Center office building, which opened in 2018. Is there a more impressive corporate headquarters — in the category of modern buildings — anywhere?

There’s another building project — just south of downtown Des Moines — that is also creating new excitement and curiosity about our state’s Italian heritage.

A new, much larger Italian American Cultural Center of Iowa is being constructed in and on the grounds of the art deco Butler Mansion on the east side of Fleur Drive. The mansion was built in the 1930s, served as an elegant family home for years, then for a couple decades became the headquarters of two advertising agencies. Different groups of Italian descendants operated different community lodges around the city, but they’ve now come together on the new one.

Community leaders Jeff Lamberti and Loretta Sieman, both of whom have Italian heritage, have headed a fund drive that enabled the purchase of the Butler Mansion for $3 million. A renovation and major expansion will bring total investment to as much as $20 million. RDG Planning and Design is doing the architectural work.

“It’s a complex project,” said Lamberti. “Basically, we’re to have about 42,000 square feet on seven acres, and we’re restoring the Butler Mansion at the same time. We’ll have an event center with room for 500, a museum, a library, a cooking center, coffeehouse, overnight rooms that will be available for weddings and other special events, and five indoor bocce ball courts, too.

“In our museum, half of it will tell the Iowa story of how so many Italian immigrants settled here, but the other half will be a professional museum with touring exhibits and all kinds of programming. We’ll have an Italian American Cultural Center, and a good one, but it won’t be just for Italians.”

Lamberti, 62, a lawyer, former state legislator and president of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, and for 17 years the owner of the Iowa Barnstormers arena football team, said his own ancestors came from just north of Florence in Italy.

“Our actual hometown is up in the mountains there,” he said. “I’ve been to Florence — it’s got a ‘Lamberti Street.’ I haven’t been to the small town where we actually came from, but my parents have been.” They are Don and Charlene Lamberti, who were founders of the Casey’s General Stores chain of convenience stores.

 

From Chapter 1 of my book “Babe: An Iowa Legend,” published in 1989: “As with so many of my published tales, for me the Babe Bisignano story began in my old hometown of Shenandoah, Iowa. It was on a fall day in 1958, possibly 1959, and I was 11 or 12 years old. The priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church was one Msgr. Paul Marasco, native of Des Moines, the first Italian I ever remember meeting… I was one of the monsignor’s altar boys.

“What happened on that autumn day, I’ve come to understand as an adult, was that Monsignor Marasco had earlier asked whatever form of a parish council that existed at that time to purchase a new organ for the church. Being small town Iowans and knowing that the old organ still seemed to be working, they said no. Whereupon, he went around them.

“Unbeknownst to me, and I guess unbeknownst to anyone else in the parish, he called an old friend in Des Moines, his boyhood pal Babe Bisignano, the well-known restaurateur in the capital city. This man Bisignano bought a new organ and ordered it delivered and installed in the Shenandoah church. Well, there came a Sunday when the work was all done. Morning Mass was held as usual, with no announcement of special events that afternoon. But late that morning, my mother Anna received a phone call from the rectory telling her to have ‘Chuckie’ at the church by 1:45 p.m. to serve a 2 p.m. Mass.

“Little ‘Chuckie,’ as you can imagine, was at the church in full cassock and surplice at the appointed time, not having a clue as to what was happening. And what was that? It was a special, invitation-only dedication Mass for the new organ, and no one from the home church had an invitation. Carrying the tall crucifix on a stick and in the tow of the fully robed Monsignor, I stood outside the front of the church, waiting — for what I didn’t know.

“Suddenly, around the Thomas Avenue corner came a line of the biggest, bluest, and blackest Cadillacs I’d ever seen. They stopped immediately in front of the church, just the way I’d seen funeral processions do. And out of the first Cadillac jumped a formally dressed man, the most striking-looking man I’d ever seen. And he seemed to have lots of men-lieutenants and secretaries — or at least snazzy women — with him. He sure didn’t look like anybody from Shenandoah, I knew that.

“The 12-year-old altar boy reasonably concluded that this man was surely either 1) the PRESIDENT, 2) the POPE, or 3) at least somebody who was VERY IMPORTANT. The man embraced Monsignor Marasco. Sloppy kisses, all that. And then we went through a sort of procession into the church, then the Mass, then a private reception afterward.”

It was only later that I learned I had had my first look at Alphonse “Babe” Bisignano. And it was a whole lot later — I’m talking years — when I learned I had had an early brush with an Iowa legend.

Outrageous character.

Needless to say, Bisignano quickly became almost a fixture in my Des Moines Register columns, appearing with more regularity than any other Iowan from the mid 1970s to the mid ’90s. He was always quick to remind me why he was there. “If you don’t have me in your column at least every three weeks, people will quit reading you,” he’d often say. “But make it sound like I’ve got humility.”

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