Founded in Brooklyn during the pandemic, “La Trafila” has become, in just a few years, a recognized name in the artisanal fresh pasta industry in the United States. Behind the project is Luigi Speranza, a chef and entrepreneur from Naples who arrived in New York in 2017 with one goal in mind: to challenge himself in one of the most competitive city in the world.

Let’s start with an inevitable question: what is the one dish you could never get tired of eating, even if you made it every day?

Spaghetti al pomodoro, without a doubt. To me, it represents Italy, the Mediterranean, and my roots. There is the white of the pasta, the red of the tomato, and the green of the basil. It seems like a simple dish, but that is exactly why it is difficult to do well. When you have only a few ingredients, there is nowhere to hide. Every single one of them has to be excellent. And it is a dish you can eat all year round, in summer and in winter. It is a classic that never gets old.

When did you realize that cooking would be your path?

The truth is that this passion has always been part of me. My mother passed it on to me when I was very young. I was born with a curiosity about food. I asked questions about everything and wanted to understand why things were done a certain way. I often say that one of the greatest blessings in my life was being born in Naples. The other was being born with this passion. Some things you learn, others are already inside you from the very beginning.

What is your earliest memory connected to cooking?

Sunday mornings. I was four or five years old and would wake up early just to stay close to my mother while she cooked. I would ask her why meatballs were made a certain way, why they were round, why they were fried before being added to the sauce. Looking back, it is funny. Instead of wondering why a soccer ball was round, I was wondering about meatballs. Maybe that was already a pretty clear sign of what my future would be.

Before becoming an entrepreneur in New York, you worked in Italy, across Europe, and in the United States. What do you remember about that period?

When I arrived in New York in 2017, La Trafila did not exist yet. I worked as a corporate chef for a company that operated a fresh pasta concept.

It was a very important period because it allowed me to understand the American market from the inside. I continued in that role until early 2020. Then, one month before the pandemic, I decided to leave that professional path. Shortly afterward, La Trafila was born.

What dream, or what idea, brought you to New York in 2017?

The desire to challenge myself. New York is a city that constantly forces you to measure yourself against your own limits. It does not give you breaks and it does not allow you to become complacent. I arrived with my experience, my training, and the conviction that hard work and determination eventually make the difference.

How difficult is it to build a career in a city like New York?

It takes determination, but above all humility. It is a city where you never feel like you have truly arrived. In fact, the moment you think you have, New York changes the rules of the game. I see it this way: you do not impose your conditions on the city. The city imposes its conditions on you. You need the energy and the ability to adapt continuously. It is a constant challenge, but that is also what makes it unique.

What was the insight that led to the creation of La Trafila?

It came from a combination of necessity and vision. During the pandemic, many restaurants were closing or operating under enormous difficulties. There was strong economic and professional pressure, but at the same time there was a need to keep moving forward. I decided to put everything I had learned over the years on the line and bet on fresh pasta. Not because fresh pasta did not already exist, but because I felt there was room for a different approach: greater attention to ingredients, respect for tradition, and a very wide range of products.

Why did you decide to focus specifically on fresh pasta?

Because it is a product with almost endless possibilities. We do not make just a classic tagliatella. We produce dozens of variations, from spinach pasta to squid ink pasta and even smoked preparations. I like to compare it to a painter. If you give a painter only one color, there is not much they can do. If you give them twenty colors, they can create a much richer work of art. We wanted to give chefs that same creative freedom.

La Trafila was born during the pandemic. How much did that period shape the project?

It shaped it tremendously. The pandemic was a tragedy that changed the world, bringing pain and enormous consequences. But it also deeply changed the restaurant industry. Many restaurants, even after reopening, were operating under significant limitations. They needed products that could speed up service without sacrificing quality. Fresh pasta was a perfect answer to that need. In that context, many customers discovered the potential of a product they had previously viewed in a more limited way. We were ready to recognize and respond to that shift.

Was there a particularly difficult moment you had to face?

The truth is that difficult moments never really end. They change form, but they are always there. In the beginning, I tended to blame myself for every problem. Over time, I realized that obstacles are simply part of the journey. Today, I try to see them as lessons. Every problem already contains a solution. The challenge is finding it. Once you do, you have taken a step forward. That is how we have grown over the years.

What are the biggest challenges for an artisanal producer today?

The most important one is maintaining the same level of quality over time. As you grow, the risk is losing the artisanal character that made you recognizable in the first place. We want to avoid that. We want customers who chose us six years ago to find the same attention and care today. Then there is another huge challenge: building a team and keeping it motivated. Finding talented people is difficult. Convincing them to stay and grow with you is even harder.

Looking ahead, where do you see La Trafila in five years?

Today, it is difficult to make long-term plans. The world changes quickly, and you have to remain flexible. What I can say is that we want to continue growing across the United States. Today we reach approximately 15% of U.S. states, and demand continues to increase. One project we are currently working on is expanding our facility, with the goal of increasing production capacity by 50%. It is a significant investment that will prepare us for the next stage of growth.

Is there a goal you have not yet achieved that you would like to accomplish in the coming years?

More than a single milestone, my goal is to keep expanding the business without losing our identity. I want a restaurant in California to receive our pasta with the same quality as a restaurant located just a few miles from our facility in New York. That is the challenge that motivates me every day.

If you had to summarize your entrepreneurial journey in one sentence, what would it be?

Always believe. Never give up. It may sound like a simple phrase, but it truly summarizes everything. Problems will come. Inevitably. They still do today. The difference lies in how you deal with them. I have learned that every obstacle is an opportunity to improve both the company and yourself. That is why I keep repeating the same thing to myself, from years: Never give up. Never stop believing in what you do.

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The chronicle does its course, judicial and journalistic investigations as well. Soon and over time we will know details about trying to kill Donald Trump at the White House correspondent dinner in Washington.

The attacker, Cole Tomas Allen, 31 years old, Californian, defined by his sister a progressive extremist on very radical positions, is already struggling with American justice. It strikes the oxymoron with which it has been defined, a kind murderer, as if giving death could be combined with a category of the soul that is the exact opposite, that is, that respects life with sensitivity.

But let’s go further. Ours is a reflection on hatred in politics. Better about hate in public speech. Already for the Kirk murder, the right-wing influencer killed at gunshots during a university debate, we said about the paradox of the word. At its highest level when it triggers the heart of dialectics, at its most dangerous level when it becomes the symbolic part of an action.

The old Mafia chroniclers told me that Cosa Nostra, at the height of power, killed first in the image that in the body. But let us return to the homeland of democracy, America, where the first modern Constitution was born, the first in which the golden rules of western freedom are crystallized.

America, also home to great cultural and political revolutions. A country, however, large, complex, federal and therefore composed of many anthropologies. The country of the great journalism of inquiry, the light that consumes the shadow, which reduces the occult. Yet the country of mysteries, true or presumed plots.

How many bets have I made of my Top Secret about Kennedy’s death in Dallas, how many theories, how many versions? Even for the shootings of Washington dinner someone plays on the internal plot, we say self-managed, but in these cases it takes real evidence not to end up in the intellectual circuit of an invented reality. Not to fall into the ridiculous or lack of credibility.

In real reality, instead, they spread the controversy over the Secret Service, those that once would have been the emperor’s pretorians. They saved the president, but they allowed those who wanted to kill to get too close, too many controls. But I would also leave this chapter to the record, perhaps political, security laws and norms.

The beginning point remains: hate. He will destroy the opponent, who does not think of it as you. Cancel cultures, literally. And to think that this is a more home phenomenon in the world of star democrats and stripes than in the overall grammatical-political attitude of Trump.

That has already escaped, I remember, to an attack in 2024 in Pennsylvania during the election campaign. There the bullet washed the ear and also there a great gardener like Don Winslow spoke of tomato instead of blood, as a director of the likes of Kubrick so many years ago for the landing (in that false theory) on the Moon.

Instead, I think that Trump, like all politicians who have a great charisma (has won twice the presidential ones), affects the public strongly but that it is clearly, divisive with those who do not agree with him. This is also a freedom and obviously stimulates the freedom to criticize it. But not to put him down physically.

That is no longer freedom, it is the public debate that becomes violence. Or I hate it. Lone Wolf or Wolf in Branch doesn’t matter. It is from hatred that we must defend ourselves. Solidarity President.

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Football is back in the storm. And not for matters concerning the so-called game rectangle. It was played, in the investigation that broke out suddenly (or at least it seems) and is throwing out in the environment, in other fields, night clubs and luxury hotels.

The context? The Milanese movida. At home arrests, four people are allowed to prostitution. Customers? Managers, entrepreneurs and many players, it seems at least 50, Milan, Inter, Verona, Sassuolo.

On the strictly judicial level, things will take their course, let’s say. There are no names investigated between the players and there are no names and we wouldn’t do them anyway. Because in these cases they give names beyond formal responsibilities, enough to turn on what is called scandal.

Also to me, that I am a journalist at least known in this country, in a certain story that did not concern a certain lawyer (note), he told me: you always do and anyway cause. It doesn’t matter to win, it matters to make scandal.

Football, mediatically, is still strong to ensure a large media outlet. A nice return, as they say, of visibility and copies (in the modern sense) sold. For those who need it. Others met other needs.

But in the scale of needs then we come to the media and to the so-called moral on the system. The self-control of individuals, and then the yearly issue of company controls. And then the historical evolution of evil, the balloons with the drug that dwells in the air and leaves no trace.

A phenomenon that a few months ago seems to have cost the stability of a great player. But these are cronist corners. For the rest, the smile of Chivu, the underdog that with his Inter is winning everything, is almost nothing good at the ball.

And on June 22 the new federal president is chosen. Good luck.

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This piece is not an account of an important day for Italian politics. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni presented himself at the Chambers after his defeat at the referendum for an informative note, this is the technical term, on the state of art in foreign and internal politics. The news is known, no reshuffle, no resignation, no early elections, it goes on with the majority program until 2027.

Health, safety, immigration, answers to citizens and companies on energy and inflation, the strongest consequences of the Middle East war. The negative reaction of the oppositions, Schlein for the Pd, Count for the crickets and Renzi for Italy Viva and for itself, were very hard. Predictable but also not.

This is therefore a piece on democracy in Italy while the world is on fire both in a concrete sense and in that of the grammar of a geopolitical all to rewrite, beginning with the unity of what we once called the West. In homage to the editorial line of our newspaper I mention a great American artist and intellectual, Woody Allen.

God’s dead, and I’m not doing it so well, that’s the joke. God is alive in the present of us Catholics, but democracy in Italy does not pass so well. Not because there is the center of power but because those who fight it do not make sense of the general interest.

In these days, in the face of a non-aggressive but tough premier, not insulting but resolute, a political figure that remains, remains, that does not give up at a time of general difficulty, they felt the usual answers to the limit of the insult. The right of criticism is sacred, but the obsession of taking the place of another is not polis, that is politics for citizens, politics for Italians.

And the house plan for 100 thousand people announced since May 1? Almost a nuisance, a nullity on the media by now towing obsessives, better to put it with Trump and Israel as if tomorrow one of our leaders could play in public discourse with historical allies that can also make their mistakes. Like everyone in history.

Wrong or not it is our country, said an American sailor at the dawn of the first modern Constitution, that which sanctions freedoms that in Iran or China or Russia, for example, are denied. But ours, for those who do not command, is always a wrong country. Except forget the mistakes he made when he commanded.

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He finally resigned. We are talking about the president of the FIGC Gravina that after the meeting with the members of the Federal Council decided to throw the sponge. Someone said he left for two wrong rigours. No, I’m saying, he leaves for two world-wide failed a few years.

Drama, sporty but not only, also political, symbolic, economic, marketing, poetic, anthropological, generational, which is added to the disadventure of the Tavecchio-Ventura couple. There are three worlds missing in 12 years.

The last time we went out to Brazil to the qualifying rounds, played by Uruguay. Four years earlier, humiliated by small Slovakia. Then humiliated by the very small North Macedonia. Now modest Bosnia. Germany, France, Spain, England, Argentina are already in another series. Maybe we’ll only see them in friendly.

But let us return to the political and ethical question of resignation in our country. On Tuesday evening, late evening, the stone convoys of that surreal press conference we saw said: resign all immediately and in chorus. Nothing personal, but everyone failed in their managerial role. Buffon boh, Ringhio cries, and Gravina tries to throw it on politicians. And he says there is an obsession with him.

The Minister of Sport Abodi has defeated him and even a majority and opposition, which fight on everything, agrees to ask Prime Minister Meloni to lodge him. Let’s miss the gaffe on other sports and other sportsmen who are doing great Italy, but when you are wrong at these levels you immediately resign yourself to motu proprio.

The motives of this deep crisis of our football we have told them all in recent years until exhaustion, Galliani is right, one of the possible heirs, to say “what a beard that bored, what a beard that boredom”. We are not victims of our history, it is that we no longer know how to read the present time.

My son Ale when he drove us crazy in Berlin was in my wife’s belly. Maybe he’ll be a sports journalist, he’s a milanist, but in San Siro he’s running an American fund. A little further on Lake Como there is a former team that risks going to Champions with money and non-Italian intelligence. They do not play Italians in Como and Milan gives almost nothing to the national team.

I think that’s enough and left. Good luck to those who will come even if in addition to luck we need work, skills, organization, vision. To have a dream in the drawer also needs the drawer.

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The referendums were, they are and remain the metaphor of democracy. What they say is what citizens say and the responsi must be accepted in their objective value. In Italy many people ran to the urns (almost 60 percent, in contrast to the last administrative consultations) to say NO to two questions concerning the system of justice reform: the separation of careers between inquirent and judiciary magistrates and the formation of two new CSMs with a historical change of method of composition, that is the draw.

The victory of the NO freezes the reform of justice, which will probably never happen in this country, and triggers a real political earthquake. The minister of Northern Justice for now resists but fall the heads of the undersecretary of the Master and of the head of cabinet Bartolozzi, both protagonists of very strong polemics and in backlight, let’s say so, in the days that preceded the vote.

While we write, the Minister of Tourism Santanchè has been resigned, involved in several investigations that nothing but have to do with his work in the government. The feeling and perhaps the temptation is that of a Meloni bis, but beyond everything affects the quantity and quality of the vote.

They voted so many young people who obviously not only want to change something that has to do with some sort of constitutional solidity, but also expressed their concern beyond questions that remain very technical to me.

In America there are midterm elections, a thermometer for presidents in office. Here, a year after the new policies, a majority and opposition have been measured in the whole field without making metaphors, with a premier forced to descend into the battle alive in recent days because the narrative of Yes had become weak.

How many times have we said that in these times of the Internet we live in a world of narratives? The ability of the narrator does not always cover the problem of the deep object of the narrative itself.

Italy is a country in transformation and everyone has understood that geopolitical can change our daily life (energy, gasoline and cost of money). The wounds of Tangentopoli that since 1992 put in front of politics and justice count less, I think, of the coming at the end of the month or having clear a project for the future.

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It’s been 48 years. Lights and shadows. Neither history nor justice have given us a completely acceptable truth about what happened in the tragic spring of 1978.

On March 16th at 9:00 a.m., a commando of the Red Brigades entered via Fani, the Trionfale district of Rome. Take two machines by tightening them into a deadly trap before a traffic light and then targeting them with dozens and dozens of shots of miter. They kidnap Aldo Moro and kill the five escort members: Giulio Rivera, Oreste Leonardi, Raffaele Iozzino, Domenico Ricci, Francesco Zizzi.

To them and to all men and women of the forces of order that every day are at the forefront to defend our security, to all the servants of the state who defend our institutions, went the first thought of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Of the various surveys I have dedicated to the Moro case in one of the programs that I consider most important in my long history in Mediaset, or Top Secret, one I have shot it entirely in via Fani.

Not only because it was a tragedy in itself and the beginning of a terrible tragedy that then involved a whole country and not only, but precisely to pay homage to those five innocent lives that we always talk about and at the same time always too little.

The leader of the DC was then held prisoner for 55 days and after a long and extensive negotiation full of twists of scene and mysteries, of unknown and far-known coves, of spiritual sessions and hunts for useless and misleading man, was executed by the Red Brigades. So at least they say the regretted terrorists that would shoot.

Of course, that poor defenseless and snugged body in the trunk of a red Renault in Via Caetani in the center of the capital marked, on May 9, 1978, a watershed in the history of the Republic.

That sacrifice, and I use this word not by chance, of which Moro was perfectly aware in his letters (whose disappearance and reappearance are a mystery in the mystery) allowed the defeat of that extremist organization and forever removed what was called “historical compromise” (Dc + Pci).

Could Moro be saved? Sure. But he wasn’t saved.

The so-called American advisor of the then Minister of Interior Cossiga, Steve Pieczenik, in an extraordinary interview released in New York to my Top Secret in May 2008 (was the special for 30 years after death) clearly said the political reasons of that sacrifice without obviously making names or pushing us into the hall of the Ennism, almost useless, process with the Latin numeration.

We will deepen at the right time, but in advance that for my sources the official version of the death of the President of the DC does not hold, as does not hold the official version of what happened in via Fani. That morning shooting there were more people and more experienced with the automatic weapons of four ideological intellectuals.

Have you ever wondered why 5 escort agents were killed in a few seconds without even having time to react and Moro remained “miraculously” unharmed? To the prox bet….

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What about Italy? He does his, with caution and attention. The war in Iran and the Middle East in subjugation require rapidity but also rationality. Premier Giorgia Meloni moves on two axes.

It keeps the relationship with Europe constant, thinking more about the energy protection of the EU (avoiding the shock of four years ago with the Russian invasion of Ukraine) than to find a square in a unitary foreign policy always complex, and at the same time keeps the relations with the most important ally, namely Trump’s America.

As always in our country, foreign policy ideologically breaks public opinion and politics. Rather than seeking a synthesis for the credibility and authoritativeness of a nation on the bench of the world, we divide and discuss ourselves trying to identify weaknesses and contradictions of either side.

But these are the moments when one integrates, one puts intelligence and the skills available, and the message is addressed with serenity above all to the oppositions that must help those who govern (it would be the discourse also to inverse parties) to unravel the matassa.

The government has recently allocated a nice group for families and companies on the issue of energy costs and is attentive to the issue of defence as it is placed in the foreground also from Brussels and the sensitivity of so-called European citizens (category always clear mathematically and always elusive culturally).

We are not at war, the Constitution has been respected and the use of American bases (which are not UFOs but the fruit of historical agreements within the Atlantic Alliance) decides Parliament.

Then look to the needs of citizens, to the consequences that this conflict can bring on the economic chains, on inflation, on increases not only of gas and fuel but also of a whole series of products that suffer from the naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

To say of the delicacy of the situation and the need for a unitary and serious posture, President Mattarella was in motion, which on Friday, March 13 called the Supreme Council of Defense. Theme, the analysis of the international situation and the effects of the crisis in Iran.

There will be the most closely involved prime ministers and ministers (East, Defense, Interior, Economics, Enterprises and Made in Italy) and the Chief of State of Defense. In short, a highly institutional deployment as our Constitution provides for in emergency situations.

No fear but and no escalation by us communicators. Trump, who also spoke with Putin, seemed rational and more prudent in drawing a time perhaps shorter than the attack on Tehran, whose military situation and internal power remains evolving and to monitor with non schematic information.

For now you can only stand at the window, geopolitics can not be simplified in a bar discussion, place I love in the metaphor of football but that is not good for the complexity of a new world that needs to be explained to citizens with attention and honesty. Like never in the last decades.

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When you lift too much dust, you have to put the right glasses and see what happens inside that vortex. It should be the work of us journalists who try to decode for public opinion this immense dust that has risen in the Middle East. It is the dust that arises from the targets hit by the missiles of both sides and is the dust, in the sense of confusion and non-clearness, in terms of geopolitical language.

It is rewriting not only the Middle East but, for some time, the whole world. At least as we Westerners knew him in this long period (of peace for the great part) immediately after the trauma of World War II. Donald Trump wants to be an absolute protagonist of this new international grammar.

With the summit in Alaska this summer he unleashed Putin and started a peace negotiations for the Ukraine issue that in fact leaves Europe at the window. Europe itself, rather than being a part of that West as we have always thought, seen, felt, politically and culturally, has become a no more essential part of a global chessboard in formation.

Relations with China remain those of a definitive conflict for those who will control the world economically in the 21st century. Why then this joint attack with Israel to Iran? Because there are conditions to redefine once and for all the balances of one of the most unstable and complex areas of the planet.

Speaking analytically and without giving judgments of value, the long reaction of Israel to the October 7 bombing hamas to the south, in Gaza, and Hezbollah to the north, in Lebanon. Both terrorist movements but almost institutionalized. Sunnita the first, Shiite the second, but both armed arms of Iran of the Ayatollahs.

Instead of erasing Israel is now Israel, which with the support of America is regulating the accounts in the region. Sunni Arab countries, Saudi Arabia in the head, stand in the window but are ready to participate in a new framework of balances and economic affairs.

Tehran’s atomy certainly was a great spauracchio and may have been a motive, but now it is the change of regime the mission. The Iranian regime resists internal repression and missile responses arriving to Cyprus, but is bombarded 24 hours a day in its neuralgic military snodes.

Trump said that you can go on for a long time, the consequences do not know what they will be, but of course Tehran so he can not resist. The American media say in the last few hours that Russia is helping militarily Iran, but the game there seems destined to a certain end.

The United States and Tel Aviv are masters of the skies and with a hammering of this kind may not need, as they say, boots on the field. That is the ground forces, that is victims and wounded (unfortunately there are already on one side and on the other).

Many are with the Iranian people who have suffered in recent years ferocious repressions, many speak instead of an international law violated. But as we said before the fetishes of the twentieth century are no longer there. And it is not true that now only the law of the strongest, but as always the strongest write history.

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Winter Olympics ended. A great celebration of beauty and joy at the Arena di Verona. Sports success, thirty medals and a bronze podium that has escaped us for a silver medal of Holland (not only counts the number but the hierarchy and the prestige of the same medals) but above all success of image for Italy.

Where the term image is declined in many variations: efficiency, safety, organization, tourism, economic return, structures destined not to be cathedrals in the desert but works that remain for citizens, beginning with the improvement of mobility. You are an example, said number one of the CIO, Kirsty Coventry, and Giovanni Malagò is sure that in four years the French will copy our format.

A new format, the so-called widespread Olympics, where a technological and financial city like Milan and our Alps has mixed with wisdom. The brands like Cortina but also the historical slopes and the new slopes, the valleys, the territories. A success not of Made in Italy as a product but of Made in Italy as a capacity in the complexity of an event of these proportions.

The great beauty but also the great modernity, the work of men and women, certain athletes but also the forces of order and volunteers. Our country has set aside for a while the spirit of Guelphs and Ghibellines and has found itself a team. A winning team.

Our premier Giorgia Meloni, present at the closing ceremony of Verona, recognizing the work of all and the people who make our country great, has returned on a battle horse: the Italian pride, the pride of being Italian. He had said that in the early days of his mandate that only by going around the world he had noticed how good we were but that especially they told us, they recognized him. On the other hand, we are often just vittimism and we are venting.

A pride and emotion that will last for a long time, Giorgia Meloni repeated. Part of the curtain on Milan-Cortina 2026 but now space, and media importance, to the Paralympics. Ready to tifare our athletes again.

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