Gino Gullace (1918-1990) was “the Calabrian journalist who reported on America”, the first news correspondent of publishing house Rizzoli.

In the early ’80s Gino Gullace met Nino Foti in his hometown of Ferruzzano (Reggio Calabria), on the occasion of the presentation of the event “Sud Italia chiama Europa”, a photography collection by film director Silvio Peluffo, from his motion picture L’autostrada dell’Unità, which was awarded at the International Film Festival of Salerno.

In October 1986, after about two years of stimulating preparatory work in Italy and the United States, Gino Gullace and Nino Foti met again in Rome where, on the latter’s initiative and together with other influential people of Italian origin, founded the Magna Grecia International Association, an organization created with the aim of spreading knowledge of the Magna Graecia culture and civilization and explaining to Italian emigrants in the United States and around the world, mainly from the southern regions of Italy, that:

“To look for their spiritual roots, they had to go back 2,500 years, when the she-wolf that would suckle Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, was yet to be born.”

In July 1987, Gullace and Foti officially celebrated the First International Symposium of Magna Graecia, the first public event of the Association, in the presence of a distinguished audience gathered in the hall of the Protomoteca of the Italian Parliament, in Rome. Gullace’s contribution, who was already working at the Rizzoli Corporation in New York, was that of an outstanding intellectual who encouraged people to tackle major issues, to deepen their cultural roots and above all to broaden their then narrow geographical horizons. The first Italian Delegations were joined by Delegations in the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany and Switzerland.

The life of Gino Gullace, his professionalism and humanity were at the center of an evocative initiative sponsored by the municipality of Ferruzzano and scrupulously organized by the family members who had the opportunity to share the friends that the writer met during the course of his fervent journalistic activity.

Due to his humble beginnings and impoverished family, Gullace’s early education was erratic at best; nevertheless, he managed to get a degree in Modern Literature at the age of 22. At the beginning of the Second World War, he was drafted in the army and after attending officer candidate school, he was posted to the Dodecanese as a second lieutenant of infantry on the island of Rhodes, Greece.

After September 8, 1943, in order to escape capture by the Germans who would have sent him to a concentration camp in Germany, he fled with a rowboat from Rhodes and landed in Turkey.

It was during the war that Gullace nurtured his other great passion: his love for Hellenism and ancient Greece, which he identified with his homeland, Calabria.

At the end of the war, he returned to Italy in 1945 and resumed his activity as a teacher, becoming a protagonist of the movements and political-cultural initiatives that animated the world of Reggio. The memories of that period are brilliantly narrated in one of his poems included in the book Ricordi della Prigionia written together with his brother Giovanni, who was also, at that time, a reserve officer.

An illustrious Calabrian and a distinguished journalist of great humanity and intellectual honesty, Gino Gullace was also an emigrant.

In 1948, driven by his intellectual and social curiosity, he left for the United States where he began to collaborate with some Italian-American newspapers. At the beginning of the ’50s he was contacted by publishing house Rizzoli for a collaboration with the Italian weekly OGGI. That is when his career in journalism took off.

Gullace became the chronicler of Magna Graecia, of Calabria and of the Greek people that inhabited those places many centuries ago. He associated the first migratory phenomenon in history, that of the Greeks settling in southern Italy, with the migratory phenomenon that took place two thousand years later, from Europe to America:

“… the most civilized people on earth who looked to the Calabrian coasts like the ones of two thousand years later, looked to America. Calabria was the America of the Greeks, the land of a thousand opportunities to improve one’s life and strive for a bright future.”

In his Back To The Roots: A View Of Magna Graecia published by Fleetwood Litho & Letter Corp. N.Y. in 1987, he described in a clever style an era that went back in time eight hundred years before the birth of Christ, sometimes creating the impression that Gullace himself was the news correspondent of an Athens newspaper of the time, following the emigrants who, on triremes, sailed the Ionian sea for the same reason that would later cause other emigrants to leave their homeland:  the desire to improve their living conditions, make a fortune and create a better future for themselves.

A scholar of Calabrian emigration to the New World, he had discovered, during his research, that the first Calabrian to touch the American shores was one Giovanni Carreri Gemelli, born in 1651 in Taurianova, which was then called Radicena.

Carreri arrived in the United States during a six-year world tour that he undertook in 1693 and was the author of the phrase that Gullace later reused for the title of the book: L’America ci salverà dai nostri bisogni, published in Italy shortly before his death.

In his early years in the United States, Gullace wrote as a news correspondent from Rochester, a town in the Upstate, and then moved to New York, taking on the position of head of the Rizzoli cultural center, based on Fifth Avenue.

In about forty years of journalistic activity, Gullace told Italians who knew very little about the life of Americans characterized by vice, extravagance and virtues. His journalism was objective and comprehensive, ranging from social to political and scientific issues. Famous are the portraits of American Presidents, from the Kennedys to the Reagans, of whom he wrote a great biography for the publisher Dino. He interviewed the most powerful and learned men. He tackled the most burning issues with great honesty and an even greater confidence derived from his eclectic culture.

He conducted investigations on schools, brain drain, the frontiers of medicine and psychiatry. He dealt with cinema, space flight, the Universe, the epic of the West and Italian Americans. He was a friend of outstanding people from the world of journalism and culture such as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pietro Nenni and Enzo Biagi. It was with the latter, together with Antonio De Falco, Guido Gerosa, Gian Franco Venè and Lorenzo Vincenti, that in 1969 Gullace collaborated on the writing of La luna è nostra. Storie e drammi di uomini coraggiosi, an essay published among the specials of the weekly OGGI for the Astronautics section, a photographic journey towards the conquest of that airless satellite immersed in silence called the Moon. In 1988, his friend Enzo Biagi wrote for him the preface of his book entitled “Un uomo in grigio alla Casa Bianca. L’uomo più potente del mondo chi è e come viene eletto“, which describes with great objectivity the figures of American presidents, the events and scandals of the inhabitants of the White House in those years, covering their most intimate and unknown aspects.

A special friendship also bound him for years to journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci who, in 1985, was his guest in his villa in Ferruzzano.

He died in Milan in 1990.