Rocco Caporale (1927-2008) was an eminent scholar, educator and southerner, he was Vice-President of the Magna Grecia International Association from 1987 to 1990 and then became President from 1990 to 1997, dedicating his life to research and sociology.

Born in Santa Caterina dello Ionio (Catanzaro), son of Francesco Caporale and Francesca Badolato, he arrived in the United States in 1960. He attended Columbia University in New York and was a student of the sociologist Robert K. Merton, specializing in Sociology of Religions, a field on which, in 1972, he published a very successful book in the U.S.A and Italy.

He began as an assistant professor at Manhattanville College from 1963 to 1965, and in later years was a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley from 1966 to 1968, director of research at The Claremont Colleges in California from 1968 to 1972, and professor of sociology at St. John’s University in New York, where he founded the Department of Sociology.

Although he taught in New York, he spent long periods of time in Naples, in his studio in Via Toledo.

Academic research was not the only interest of Professor Caporale who, above all, had a passion: to promote and support his homeland: southern Italy.

For this reason, he created several organizations that straddled Italy and many countries around the world and that allowed him to promote cultural exchange and research. Under his direction, the Institute for Italian American Studies and the Pontes International Association, founded in Naples in 2005, worked to carry out cultural exchanges in southern Italy and the rest of the world, in particular between Italy and China, where he actively participated in the meetings promoted through the Convention between the University of Naples Federico II and the People’s University of Beijing.

From 1990 to 1997, he was appointed President of the Magna Grecia International Association and of the International Committee for Southern Italy.

In addition to these activities, Caporale also became involved with the Italian Committee for Heritage and Culture, as responsible for organizing the events of the Italian Heritage Month in New York City.

He was a member of the Scientific Committee for the awarding of the “Guido Dorso” International Award for Meridionalism, promoted by the homonymous Association, with the patronage of the Senate of the Republic and the “Federico II” University of Naples.

He held the position of President of the International Committee for the South (ICM), of which Nobel Prize winner Franco Modigliani was Honorary President.

Caporale was the scientific director for the U.S.A. of the magazine “Mezzogiorno d’Europa”, also published in English. He was very proud of his research, which made him known both in Italy and abroad, on reconstruction after the Irpinia-Basilicata earthquake of 1980. In this research, conducted through the Institute for Italian-American Studies (INIAS) which was funded by the National Science Foundation and IRI, Caporale looked into the ins and outs of those events. In 1990, the echo of his studies reached high institutional levels and he was invited to give an in-depth report before the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the post-earthquake reconstruction in Irpinia. Caporale had in fact conducted significant research on this subject, revealing a system of corruption and bribery that later became known as “Irpiniagate”.

As a sociologist and expert in migration patterns, Caporale understood how important statistical analysis was for the Italian voters abroad. In fact, he dedicated several years of his career to the study of data from the Registry of Italians Abroad (AIRE) on compatriots abroad, on behalf of various provinces, municipalities and some public bodies in the South. With the extension of the right to vote to Italians living abroad, considering his deep knowledge of the Italian presence especially in the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico, Caporale dedicated himself to the study of all the inconsistencies of this database, on which the right to vote of every Italian abroad is based.

He died in New York in 2008. Among the countless friends who gathered to share anecdotes, thoughts and moments from Professor Caporale’s life, the great playwright and director at that time of the Magna Grecia International Association in New York, Mario Fratti, remembered him as “a person for whom even stones had a story to tell“.