How the Roman Empire Took to the Sea & My Italian-born Dad Got His Odd Name
By DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO | October 14, 2025
So, here’s the thing. My father was born in 1925, way up in the rolling Calabrian hills of southern Italy. He was christened with a first name — Dulio — that I could never find attached to any other Dad, official person, or random guy in the fat American phone books of my youth. I had no trouble finding a rhyming name with its own cross-cultural roots — ‘Julio.’ Yet as for finding anyone named ‘Dulio’? “Never …” as I recount in the mini-documentary-slash-sorta memoir that you can click into life above. (Or if you’d rather read the tale, see the script below, plus you can listen to an audio version of ‘FROM ITALY, WITH LOVE’ on the new WestVirginiaVille podcast.)
The story of my father’s name got odder still when I was old enough to look through family records and explore the online archives of Ellis Island. There, I found a shipping record of my toddler Dad’s arrival in America at age 3, in September 1929, along with his mother (my future Grandma Catherine, nee ‘Caterina Napoli’) and his two older brothers (my future uncles Louie and Ed, nee ‘Luigi and ‘Eduardo’). The four had been summoned from the Old Country by my future grandfather, Eugenio, who had found work in the New Country. Yet these records — along with others detailing my Dad’s Merchant Marine service in World War II, plus an Army-stint in Occupied Japan — all list his first name with an extra ‘i.’
As in, Duilio. Pronounced: Doo-ILL-ee-oh.
Hmmmm. What is up with this extra ‘i,’ and your name no one else in America seems to have, dear Dad — a.k.a. ‘Dulio,’ a.k.a. ‘Duilio?!? After the war, he ditched the extra vowel and become just Dulio-rhymes-with-Julio. The problem was that my father was not a personal history guy. And he is long passed on. So, this was a mystery that the lifelong storyteller and career journalist in me set out to solve. The effort tumbled me down a rabbit hole right into the watery heyday of the Roman Empire.
Here’s the second thing. Once I began casting my net farther afield, I found that old phone listings, official records, and not a few Italian warships are chock-a-block with the name ‘Duilio,’ if you only direct your attention to the storied hills, dales, and coastlines of Italy. The name tracks far back into the country’s past, to an oceanic warrior named Gaius Duilius. My guy (as in, ‘GUY-us Doo-ILL-ee-us’) led the Roman Empire to its first major conquest on open water, defeating the sea lords of Carthage in the Battle of Mylae in 260 B.C., in the First Punic War. His success off the coast of Sicily — juiced by the latest war-on-water technology called a ‘corvus’ — would ring his name down through Italian history. A host of the country’s warships would come to be christened ‘Duilio’ in multiple centuries. And, also, back up in the hills a few hours south of Naples, a certain Calabrian kid got the name, too, born into what was to become a very large Italian family, who left out of Italy via the Port of Naples, passed through Ellis Island in the early 20th century, and set down roots alongside Lake Erie in Lorain, Ohio.
And therein lies more than a few tales.
So, ‘FROM ITALY WITH LOVE: How the Roman Empire Took to the Sea & My Italian-born Dad Got His Odd Name’ marries personal storytelling from my life with historical re-creation. This 28-minute mini-documentary/book excerpt brings to life two chapters from my forthcoming ‘literary auto-fictional memoir,’ titled ‘CRAZY DAYS: Confessions of a Fallen Altar Boy.’ The film crosses a lot of territory as it animates these excerpts and related tales, via text, music, imagery, photos, and AI-created cinematic clips I produced with Google’s Veo 3 platform. (More on the controversies over creative use of AI in a future post.) So, please check out the video above. Or read the script below. Or go for a walk and listen to the audio version. And for notice of the publication of my ‘CRAZY DAYS’ book sometime next year — please knock along with me on the wood nearest you — and to see more excerpts brought to multimedia life, free subscribe to this website or at: westvirginiaville.substack.com.
P.S.
I first read ‘FROM ITALY WITH LOVE,’ along with an abbreviated slideshow, to a gathering of The Anvil Club, at the University of Charleston in West Virginia’s capital on October 2, 2025. Being an obsessively compulsive storyteller and documentarian (I need to address in therapy my Freudian urge to over-elaborate), the video above is far more illustrated than what my fellow Anvilians saw in that address. So, this post goes out to club members who’d like a deeper visual take or couldn’t make it out, as well as anyone invested in the Roman Empire’s ever-engrossing history. It especially goes out to writers and readers intrigued by auto-fictional writing from one’s personal life. It’s also a bit of a case study in using moving imagery — here, I take note of the tendentious debate over AI-created image creation — to tell intimate tales and share literary auto-fictions from books-to-be.
TEXT/SCRIPT VERSION:
‘FROM ITALY WITH LOVE: How the Roman Empire Took to the Sea & My Italian-born Dad Got His Odd Name’ by Douglas John Imbrogno
I am going to start off by by reading publicly for the first time — yes, you are my virginal test audience — two chapters from a forthcoming ‘literary, auto-fictional memoir’ titled ‘CRAZY DAYS: Confessions of a Fallen Altar Boy.’ What the heck is a literary, auto-fictional memoir? Here’s how I define it. I’m recounting true stories from my life, yet embellished with novelistic storytelling. Everything is true — except for what’s not. And I also — as you will hear when I get to the Roman Navy’s first big sea battle — conjure up whole cloth a storified tale of actual history of how something might have gone down. In this case, the time the Roman Empire took to the seas to prove itself on water using some of the latest sea battle technology.
So let us begin, shall we? We open on a tri-level house in a leafy suburb north of Cincinnati called Forest Park, where I did a lot of my growing up and which was the launching pad that later landed me in West Virginia. But my family story — like yours, to be sure — goes way, way further back than that.
Somewhere in the house, the boy’s father stormed and raged. Room to room, minute after minute. What was it this time? Had one of the boy’s sisters gotten home too late from a high school party in too-tight jeans, her irises dilated with the latest fearsome drug which supposedly had infiltrated the daughter-filled suburbs? Or had his mother said something to set him off?
“DU! You have to control yourself!”
Which, of course, was the one thing to say to send him careening yet more out of control.
“Me? This house is out of control, and I’m the one who should control himself?!?”
She called him ‘Du’ when she really needed to get the attention of the handsome, hot-headed Italian man who had determinedly wooed and won her on the streets of Lorain, Ohio. Full name: ‘Dulio Foster Imbrogno.’ Yet the Italian rendering of his name — still found on his birth certificate and World War II service papers and Merchant Marine documents — listed his name as ‘Duilio Faustino Imbrogno’ — with an extra ‘i’ and rolling ‘r’s’ when given its original Italian lilt. The ‘Faustino’ — the Italian version of ‘Foster’ — was also found in the documents.
The young man tensed his shoulders. There it was upstairs again somewhere, his mother’s sharp exhalation, a brief, strident burst of sound.
‘DU!!!’
He always heard it with a string of exclamation points, this sharp, monosyllabic cry, which seemed to appear and reverberate throughout the house almost weekly.
“DU!!!!!!”
The boy gathered his bed covers to his neck in his basement bedroom. As usual, his younger brother seemed able to sleep through it all. Yet, maybe he was over there in the darkness on the room’s other side, one eye cracked open, quivering like him. On edge. To distract his mind, the boy considered his father’s odd Italian first name. In his 11 years of life, consuming hundreds of magazine articles and books at a steady clip, he had not ever once come across this name.
‘Julio, yes. Dulio? Never …’
Upstairs, a door opened. Another slammed with a thunderous clap, like when the ventilation in the house — wind entering one window, pressure equalizing elsewhere — CRASHED! a door shut. The boy recalled a word discovered recently in some article or book: scirocco.
‘Sure-ROCK-oh!’
He loved the word’s sound and the powerful wind it described. He sought out a fuller definition in the foot-thick dictionary at the back of his 5th grade classroom at Our Lady of the Rosary Elementary School. The definitions were evocative. After all, his father had been born right about in the center of the instep of Italy’s boot. And southern Italy was one place where sciroccos came to call, according to the dictionary. The boy had slipped open the rose-red cover of his latest journal to write down in blue ink highlights of the word’s further meaning:
SCIROCCO: A hot, humid south or southeast wind of Southern Italy, Sicily, and the Mediterranean islands. Originating in the Sahara Desert as a dry, dusty wind, but becoming moist as it passes over the Mediterranean. This oppressive, relaxing wind is chiefly experienced in Italy. Malta and Sicily …
His father was indeed a scirocco. Yet, what did it mean that a scirocco could be both oppressive and relaxing? Upstairs, he noticed that things had grown quiet. In the space of silence that followed, his mind took off like a bottle rocket. Thinking about Italy, the Roman Empire. Heroes and enemies. Growing up, he had peppered his father for details about the family’s Italian roots, hoping to hear some heroic, legendary detail by which to establish the family specialness. Or maybe his own specialness?
“Do we have relatives who served in the Roman Empire? Are we related to Julius Caesar?!? Were any Roman legionaries or famous Italian warriors or generals named Imbrogno?!?”
About all they knew was that young Duilio Faustino had left for America with his family in 1929 at age three. He had come through Ellis Island with his mother and two young brothers. The boy’s father had no memories of his Italian boyhood. His Dad’s glancing facility with the Italian tongue would show mostly in how he rounded off phrases like pasta fagiole, prosciutto, and mozzarella, with rolling Italian inflections, often while cooking his own Italian feasts in the kitchen.
Pasta fagiole. Prosciutto. Mozzarella …
“We come from a long line of Italian peasants, I think,” his dad would say, only half-jokingly, when in calmer, better, sweeter moods.
The young man was not satisfied. He read as much as he could about the Roman Empire, one of the most powerful and influential in all of human history, after all. And it was part of his direct bloodline! Rome’s vast ambition and successes had utterly influenced the shape of a world he was just beginning to comprehend, even a score of centuries after its immense power had devolved into ruins, tourism, and so-called Italian restaurants serving bland spaghetti sauce. Unlike his father’s redolent sauce, which took three days to concoct …
One day, the young boy headed out the front door. He strode up the Waycross Road hill to the red-brick Forest Park Library, a favorite hideout just 10 minutes away on the other side of the intersection at the top of his climb. In the history section on a high shelf he needed a stool to reach, he found a military account of the Roman Empire. And there, by Jove, was the candidate Italian hero he had long sought!
Gaius Duilius.
The 3rd century B.C. Roman consul and general shared his father’s own name — or a version of it. Or maybe his father had been named for him. Or maybe — what did the Hindus and Buddhists say about rebirth? Maybe his father had once been Gaius Douglas?!?
The idea delighted him. This fellow, this warrior, had delivered the Roman Empire’s first-ever naval victory, the young man read. His eyes, devoured the words, flipping through pages. Who knew the Roman Empire even HAD a navy? Yet Gaius Duilius was so famous that three ships of the Regia Marina, the old Italian Royal Navy, plus others in the present-day Italian Navy, had been christened in honor of the man. The boy wrote down the ship names in his journal:
The Italian vessel Duilio was an ironclad warship launched in 1876 …
The Italian ship Duilio was an Andrea Doria class battleship, launched in 1913 …
The Italian vessel Caio Duilio was an Andrea Doria class helicopter cruiser launched in 1962 …
That evening in his basement bedroom,he pored over his journal notes. He pondered what he had learned of this historical figure who shared his father’s oddball name. Maybe all of his yelling was left over from a former life? Maybe he had had to order — his Dad — Roman legionaries about with LOUD declarations and even threats?!? The boy smiled at this ridiculous thought, which also had a weird charge of comfort to it. As if … well, as if, there were a good explanation — or at least an explanation — for the routine, endless, violently verbal tumult in his house growing up.
His eyelids fluttered shut. He forced them open again. Yet, then they closed more conclusively. The journal slipped from his hand, its ruby-red cover flapping open onto the throw rug beside his bed.
His head nestled into his pillow, the boy dreamed of Gaius Duilius …
Gaius Duilius scanned the churning waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea as the hills of Sicily appeared on the lip of the horizon. A string of more than 100 battleships sailed behind his own. The fleet sailed steadily toward the former Athenian territory of Mylae, a spit of land jutting north into the sea.
“Prepare the Corvus!” he cried.
His order was for his flagship, but was understood to mean all the ships so outfitted. And, so, the command passed ship to ship, deck to deck. Gaius Duilius commanded one of nearly 100 great quinqueremes, a warship battling with 90 oars to each side, manned with a detachment of nearly 100 legionaries. The Roman Senate had ordered the making of 125 quinqueremes and triremes. They were huge battleships meant to counter the hegemony on the seas, which until this day, under a hot Mediterranean sun in 260 B.C., had been owned and effectively operated by Carthage.
Rome, in fact, had never won a single battle at sea.
Gaius Duilius knew that his reputation and career — his life, too, possibly — were on the line should the Carthaginians triumph this day. After all, they had a similar number of ships, if not a few more. Their seasoned squadron was commanded by the capable Hannibal Gisgo. Plus, they had the ineffable confidence from decades of successful war-making on open water, piloting faster ships than the Roman vessels racing to confront their fleet.
Faustus Cicurinas, a trusted officer of Gaius Duilius — a friend in the cutthroat world of intrigue in the newly constituted Roman Navy — leaned two arms on the railing as oarsmen heaved the flagship towards the uncertain battle an hour away. It would be a sight to behold — more than 100 battleships meeting more than 100 battleships.
“Do you think the corvus will do the trick?” said Cicurinas.
Duilius eyed him. He raised his eyebrows in silent response to a remark that would amount to impertinence from any other sailor.
“Uh … Sir!” his friend quickly added.
While Gaius Duilius was from a patrician family, he lacked a noble lineage, which might be what bonded them. His friend’s name — Cicurinas — meant ‘person from the hillside.’ The two shared common roots in the Roman countryside. Yet ‘… appearances must be kept …,’ thought Gaius Duilius. Legionaries stood within earshot, arming themselves, preparing to battle upon the very decks of the legendary vessels of Carthage. Each and every one of the Romans knew they were meeting true masters of the sea. How would their upstart Navy compete?
With this in mind, they had outfitted their ships with an innovation dubbed a ‘corvus,’ a Latin word that meant ‘raven.’ Attached to the prow of the lead Roman ships, the device looked a bit like a looming bird. The corvus featured a plank four-feet wide and 36-feet long that could be maneuvered by axle and pulley and swung onto the deck of a Carthaginian warship. On its underside, a heavy iron spike shaped like a bird’s beak would puncture and anchor the plank in an opponent’s vessel, connecting warship to warship. And while Carthage may have better sailors, Rome had its fearsome legionaries. They would pour across the planks of the corvi, which hung ready at the prow of ships in the Roman fleet’s vanguard.
“You think the legionaries can handle them, sir?” said Cicurinas.
He nodded his chin to the flotilla of Carthaginian battleships now appearing by the dozens in the waters ahead of them.
“For this trick,” said Gaius Duilius, “our dear legionaries on this day are soldiers of the mare, of the sea. So, we shall call our sea-borne infantry not what they are called upon land, but ‘marinus,’ instead. When they cross over the corvi, they shall decide our fate.”
Faustus Cicurinas nodded his head. He looked his friend up and down, wondering if either of them would survive the day.
“You know what the Carthaginians do to commanders who fail utterly in major battles?” he said.
“I well know,” said Gaius Duilius.
He extended his arms wide, imitating a crucifixion victim. He dropped his arms. Reached one comforting hand onto the hilt of his sword.
“But today, my friend,” said Gaius Duilius, “we shall seek to notch the first victory upon the seas for Rome. It is our day. Not theirs.”
The Carthaginians, feeling perhaps overconfident — ‘Who were these land larvae Romans to challenge them on the high seas?!?’ — broke formation as the fleets closed. In short order, 30 Roman quinqueremes unfurled their corvi. With loud ‘CLOMPS! they spiked an equal number of ships from Carthage, including the flagship of Hannibal Gisgo. Hundreds of legionaries — ‘Marinus!’ Gaius Duilius corrected himself, eyeballing the operation from his lead vessel — scrabbled across the planks, swords and pikes upraised, loud cries pouring from their lips. He tracked Faustus Cicurinas crossing over to Hannibal’s ship. Lost sight of him in the clang, the roar, and crash of the battle …
It all ended more quickly than anyone could ever have suspected. Gaius Duilius knew the day belonged to Rome when a cry went up from his own flagship.
“Look there!” cried an officer. “The rat, Hannibal Gisgo, flees like the vermin he is.”
And, so, it was true. Surrounded by a smattering of officers, Hannibal Gisgo fled his overwhelmed flagship in a skiff, heading for a Carthaginian ship free from the wretched corvi. A handful of oarsmen heaved desperately in retreat across the waves, which were peppered with men. The living ones splashed in terror. The dead floated like logs. The remaining Carthaginian ships broke off, piloting faster vessels than the Romans. The ships that had not been pinioned by corvi were able to escape.
The achievements that day by Gaius Duilius and his ‘marinus’ — who would pass forward the word ‘Marines’ in centuries to come — became the legend of the Battle of Mylae, later recorded in stone on a victory column in the Forum in Rome. So, his triumph was heralded in the very pith and seat of the Roman Empire. It was indeed a proclamation to the world — and to history. Rome not only commanded vast tracts of land from Romania to Britain, its empire now extended onto the high seas.
As an older man reliving past glories, the old naval hero would sometimes stroll to the Forum with a young companion. He liked to run his fingers over the numbers carved into stone in the Forum: ‘Gaius Duilius …’ the column recounted, ‘captured 31 ships of Carthage that day off the Sicilian shore, sunk 13 others and amassed gold and silver worth at least 2,100,000 sesterces’ — the silver coin by which value was measured in the empire.
‘That was me …’ Gaius Duilius thought, hand caressing nubby stone.
A young voice beside him piped up.
“How much was 2,100,000 sesterces, grandfather?”
His 10-year-old grandson looked up at the old man. At this late stage in life, the aged warrior had a stoop to his once-tall frame. He looked back at the pillar. Then, returned his eyes to the boy.
“Well, back then, a loaf of bread cost roughly half a sesterce. And a decent flagon of wine maybe one sesterce,” he said.
He lifted the boy’s own hand so that he might run his fingers over the numbers and Latin inscriptions on the column.
“These days, a tunic will cost you 15 sesterces. And a donkey — 500? You want to buy a slave to work your farm, that will cost you maybe 6,000 sesterces, my dear Faustus …”
The boy hung on his every word. His grandfather was a great and famous man. When he went out at night into the streets of Rome, the Senate had decreed that he be accompanied by a torchman and a flutist. If he wished, that is to say. The boy knew that his grandfather often declined music for his evening strolls, although the old hero, led by a torchman, was a legend among the boy’s friends, who would sneak out of their homes just to be part of this flaming troupe. Gaius Duilius looked back down at his grandson. Yet he was at that very moment staring deeply into his past. His good friend had died that day off the coast of Mylae …
‘My dear Faustus Cicurinas .…’
It was a phrase that might well up at will at the slightest tug of an old man’s memory. He would not wish the boy or passersby to witness the great figure — ‘Was he great? He often did not feel great …’ — wipe at one eye. So, he turned away, as if to look back at the Forum.
Yet, in one small way, Faustus Cicurinas lived on. At least a little bit. Every time Gaius Duilius walked with this dear youth through the storied streets of Rome.
So, in the Fall of 2003, my older brother David and I traveled to Italy along with our Italian aunts, Theresa and Loretta, my dad’s younger sisters, who were born in America and who adored him. The goal was first to meet family we still have in the Calabrian town of Rende. And from there, head up into the hills and visit the house where my father was born on a hillside where generations of my family had lived and died.
My father was born September 21,1925, in a stone house on a steep hillside below the mountaintop commune of San Pietro in Guarano, in the southern Italian province of Cosenza in Calabria, Italy. The village of San Pietro in Guarano, the town named on my father’s birth certificate, was barely visible in the high hills that ring Rende. The town appeared only as a small tan smudge up in the green hills as seen from the balcony of a relative’s fifth floor apartment. After pointing it out, our relative — his name was Vittorio — used scissors to snip off a few of the small red peppers he grew in a pot on that balcony. They added a spicy kick to that evening’s homemade pasta, made by his wife, our great aunt, Teresa.
The hillside where my father — christened ‘Duilio Faustino Imbrogno’ — was born and our Italian forebears lived for generations was a short drive downhill from San Pietro in Guarano. Or a longer donkey trot. I came home with a rusty donkey or mule horseshoe found in the tall grass beside the house where we think my father was born. As I mentioned, no less than four Italian battleships have been christened the ‘Duilio,’ including the World War One battleship, Caio Duilio, named after Gaius, up to the Italian destroyer Caio Duilio, commissioned in 2009. I had to smile when my web research turned up these facts, given the many household ‘battles’ I experienced growing up, speaking of battles.
In fact, however, I believe my father was not named after any of these battleships, but perhaps after the S.S. Duilio, the first Italian super-ocean liner, which made its maiden voyage October 29 1923, from Naples to New York. This makes sense, as Naples is about a three-hour drive northeast of the hillside where my dad was born. The name of Italy’s greatest ocean-going vessel of the time — its Queen Mary, you might say — must have made its way into the Calabrian heartland, making itself known to my grandparents, Eugenio and Caterina Napoli Imbrogno. Or maybe they just liked the sound of this not uncommon Italian boy’s name. At least, in Italy …
Standing on that hillside in Fall 2003 was quite the moment. The steep hill was fragrant with licorice-scented wild fennel run riot and banks of sweet-smelling wild pink roses. Looking up, a grove of olive trees encircled the ridgeline. The hill was dotted from top to bottom with three old stone family houses. Caterina Napoli was born and lived in the uppermost house. Her forebears and my ancient ancestors, Michaela and Luisa Nigra Napoli, lived in the middle house. Eugenio Imbrogno’s family moved into the house at bottom after his service as a communications officer in the Italian Army in World War One.
My future grandparents must have met in the middle of that hill …
We’re not entirely certain in which house their black-haired third son was born. We’re pretty sure the lower one. But when they cast about for a name, they in effect, looked out at sea. And like the many ships that bore his name, young Duilio would soon float off across the water from the port of Naples, Italy.
My future Grandpa Eugenio, like many Italian men of his day, first went alone to America in 1922, at the age of 24, to find a foothold in the new world. Grandpa Gene, as we grandchildren would come to call him, found that foothold on the shores of Lake Erie in Lorain, Ohio. He first worked in the steel mills and, then, in his early 50s, launched the Imbrogno Standard Oil (Sohio) service station, to which he devoted his hard-working life. The gas station, which my father would help to build as an immigrant youth along with his brothers, would be the engine that powered the family’s growth. After first finding work in those steel mills, Eugenio summoned his family from the old country. I have a copy of my dad’s certificate of citizenship that says he formally entered the country and became a citizen of the United States of America on September 9, 1929.
That means that my future grandmother, at the tender age of 30, gathered up the couple’s three boys — Luigi, 7, Eduardo, 6, and Duilio, 3 — and then headed off by herself with them for Naples. That was the point of departure for so many southern Italians seeking new lives, in passenger ships that routinely packed thousands of people on board. Across the choppy Atlantic the four of them sailed that September in a passage that took about nine days. The family was poor. I can’t imagine she spoke any English. The trip was likely not terribly comfortable. The nights doubtless endured below deck in cramped steerage with pots and pans for bathroom facilities, while wealthier passengers traveled on the upper decks. I recall what another son of Italy, my uncle Bob — my grandparents’ last-born child in America — once said of the breed’s transatlantic toughness.
“Italians are made of nails!”
My dad, his brothers, and my future grandmother came over on a liner called the S.S. Conte Grande, capable of carrying nearly 8,000 passengers. I try and conjure an image of young Duilio, his two brothers, and their mother, arriving in New York Harbor that September day in 1929.
I see a three-year old Italian hillbilly kid peering through a railing. Staring in absolute wonder at the Statue of Liberty as America hove into view.
P.S.
And through many twists, turns, births, detours, dead ends, restarts and further developments, that is how you ended up with me — Douglas John Imbrogno, nee Im-BROIN-gno — sitting before you in the state of West Virginia, in October, 2025. There’s a favorite line by David Byrne from the Talking Heads song ‘Once In a Lifetime’ that I like:
‘How did I get here?!?”
Well …
Now you know.
FREE SUBSCRIBE to WestVirginiaVille’s e-mail newsletter:
WestVirginiaVille.substack.com
A view of life based in the hills of West Virginia, yet often ranging well beyond its borders in space and in time. | A multimedia web-magazine edited by DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO with guest contributors.
