Imagine being born to the wail of tornado sirens on a North Dakota nuclear missile base—that's the dramatic start to author Ryan Byrnes' incredible journey which he shares with us. His life, shaped by the wanderlust of a military family and rooted in a rich Italian heritage, unfolds in a narrative as compelling as his fiction. Ryan's quest for connection leads him from the vast American plains to the vibrant streets of Brooklyn.
The heart of our conversation beats to the rhythm of resilience, a common thread in military family stories that Ryan captures with eloquence. He recounts the solace found in the written word amidst frequent relocations and the profound impact of military psychologists in the wake of 9/11. Transitioning to tales of bygone eras, Ryan offers a glimpse into his upcoming book, "My Dear Antonio," a love letter to his great-grandparents' enduring romance from Partinico Sicily to Tunis to Brooklyn, following the success of his first publication, "Royal Beauty Bright."
Our episode sails across the Atlantic as Ryan charts a course for Italy, eager to explore the country's allure and to trace the lineage that compels his passion for storytelling. He muses on the benefits of Italian citizenship for his descendants and the tangible connection one feels when stepping onto ancestral soil. With the upcoming release of "My Dear Antonio," Ryan invites readers and listeners alike on a voyage through time, embracing the stories that bind us and the lands that call us home.
Ryan Byrnes Writes
Imagine being born to the wail of tornado sirens on a North Dakota nuclear missile base—that's the dramatic start to author Ryan Byrnes' incredible journey which he shares with us. His life, shaped by the wanderlust of a military family and rooted in a rich Italian heritage, unfolds in a narrative as compelling as his fiction. Ryan's quest for connection leads him from the vast American plains to the vibrant streets of Brooklyn.
The heart of our conversation beats to the rhythm of resilience, a common thread in military family stories that Ryan captures with eloquence. He recounts the solace found in the written word amidst frequent relocations and the profound impact of military psychologists in the wake of 9/11. Transitioning to tales of bygone eras, Ryan offers a glimpse into his upcoming book, "My Dear Antonio," a love letter to his great-grandparents' enduring romance from Partinico Sicily to Tunis to Brooklyn, following the success of his first publication, "Royal Beauty Bright."
Our episode sails across the Atlantic as Ryan charts a course for Italy, eager to explore the country's allure and to trace the lineage that compels his passion for storytelling. He muses on the benefits of Italian citizenship for his descendants and the tangible connection one feels when stepping onto ancestral soil. With the upcoming release of "My Dear Antonio," Ryan invites readers and listeners alike on a voyage through time, embracing the stories that bind us and the lands that call us home.
Ryan Byrnes Writes
Hi everyone, this is Bob Sorrentino from Italian Roots and Genealogy. Be sure to check us out on Facebook and our blog and our newsletter and our great sponsors Dolce Vita, Italy Rooting and Abiettivo Casa. And we have a great guest today, a young man author who now lives in Brooklyn, but he's got a very interesting birthplace. So his name is Ryan Burns, and welcome, Ryan, Thanks for being here.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:I love it Cool. So before we go into, you know your Italian roots and the books and things like that. Why don't you tell everybody about your interesting birthplace?
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, so I was born in North Dakota on a nuclear missile base, in a tornado. It was a pretty crazy story. Yeah, they had to. The tornado sirens were going off while my mom was giving birth I've heard this story from her a lot and they had to rush everyone into the hallway Great crazy story. Doctor had to come in and give me CPR and all this stuff. Yeah, because my, we were living on a nuclear missile base at the time and my not, and because my dad was in the Air Force so we moved around a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe maybe that was my first debut. Maybe my publishing debut will be a little smoother.
Speaker 1:So I'm sure. Well, yeah, that's a. That's certainly an interesting, interesting story. I don't know anyone who was born on the missile base, although now I guess they sell the silos if you want to live in one. So you know what got you interested in in. You know your Italian roots in the first place.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I have always heard this story from my Nana, who is the daughter of Italian immigrants, and she would always tell the story about how her mother gave her a ring that used to belong to an Italian Duke in Duchess, and I always wanted to know, like, like, where did that story come from? Where did that ring come from? She always told me bits and pieces of the story, but I never quite understood it. And then in 2020, when the COVID lockdown happened, I started learning more about the Italian, my Italian heritage, and writing more about it, and I started writing some short stories and I thought it would be a great topic for a book, because it's always good to write about your own family, because nobody else can tell that story except for you.
Speaker 2:So you know I set up a lot of calls where I interviewed my Nana and I took a lot of notes, did a lot of research. I read a lot of other books. Yeah and I. That's how I started learning more about my Italian heritage and I just became obsessed with it after a while, wanted to learn every little detail so I could relive what my ancestors went through when they came here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so great and you know what's wonderful is. You know we're losing our heritage and you know that's one of my missions is to get you know young people involved. So that's great and I should introduce you. I should introduce you to Dante Nazarro, who's a film guy, young film guy who's going to be helping us put together a movie, and he's in Brooklyn too. Oh yeah, I would love to talk to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess Dante's maybe 26, 27, 28, something like that. But you know, certainly closer to your age than mine, that's for sure. Dante, good name. So that was a family originally from Brooklyn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, when my family first came from Sicily, a lot of them settled in Brooklyn and not too far from where I am now. Then, after another generation, some of them moved to New Jersey. A lot of them joined the military and after that point they kind of spread all over the country and I grew up in, my family lived in North Dakota, ohio, illinois. They moved all over the place so but now I finally returned to Brooklyn, just in August because I wanted to come back here and work in the publishing industry.
Speaker 1:And this is where all the publishing companies are, so yeah, I didn't even know that, and I grew up in New York City, so so so how much I know about anything for that matter? So did you ever get so? Did you ever figure out where this ring came from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I have the book with me. Here's an early version of it. Yeah, my dear Antonio, and that story kind of yeah.
Speaker 2:I became obsessed and wanted to learn more and more and more about just the back story. And so the ring I have pictures of it on my social media pages. The ring is a platinum ring and it has it has like a swirl and three diamonds on it. It's done in like the art nouveau style and, yeah, it belongs to.
Speaker 2:So my great grandfather, his first wife, who he met when he was growing up in his uncle's barber shop. She was the daughter of a woman who was so her, her parents. It was a barber and this woman named Maria Menorre, and Maria Menorre was the daughter of a Duke in Duchess, and so she went and married a barber, a common barber. That was kind of scandalous and so, according to the story, she was like she was like disowned from her family because she had married a common barber, and then the two of them around that time they left Italy and moved to Tunisia where they started a barber shop. Then they had their kids. So there was some kind of falling out with the family, but she still had that ring and then she gave her that ring to her daughter. Then her daughter married.
Speaker 2:My great-grandfather was his first wife, but then she died at around age 25 with tuberculosis in the. It was about 1925, I believe. Pretty tragic, but yeah. And then the ring came down to her friend, who then married my great-grandfather and became his second wife, and that's, that's the my great-grandmother. And so she passed the ring down. So long story.
Speaker 1:But this is no, that's that's, that's cool. Yeah, you have to send me the family name, because I have to, I have to, I'm gonna have to look that up in the leave it there and see what I could find you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, we don't know who the Duke and Duchess were, because this is all just based on stories. For my Nana I've done a lot of research trying to pin down exactly who the Duke and Duchess could have been. The story is true. I've had a few candidates of Dukes and Duchesses who lived in the area at the time and some of them kind of match up with the story. So. But you can't really know for sure.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah. What part is Sicily? What were they in?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of my family grew up in. There's a little town outside of Palermo called Pardinico and it's a small town and a lot of the Orlando's that's my family, they come from there and there's a street there called it's, named after a Vittorio Orlando, who was the Prime Minister of Italy during World War One, and he's actually related to us, if I go into that a little in the book. My great grandfather is a distant cousin of his.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's a great story. Yeah, well, you know. And the reason I asked is, you know, my grandmother was from two noble families and I don't have any jewelry at all. I wish I did. There's no jewelry, there's a few. I mean, we found some of the homes, actually visited a couple of the places and things like that, but it's hard to see that. And you know, my hook was I had my great grandfather's card and that's how I, you know, that's how I was able to actually find these people. I mean, there's so many people you know, probably related to some, because there was so much nobility in Italy, you know, high nobility, lesser nobility, I mean, there were Dukes and Counts and Brin, they were all over the place. But to be able to find something, that's fantastic. But to be able to have, you know, even if it wasn't from a, you know, a Duke or a Duchess, just to have that piece of history, is fantastic.
Speaker 2:So who has the ring now? My?
Speaker 1:my.
Speaker 2:Nana still wears, wears it. From my understanding, it used to have three, three bands on it and I think she, she like, separated it and made three rings out of it and gave it to her daughters. That's what happened to it, but she still. She still has one, one of the bands of it that she wears.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that's cool. Well, I have to get her on this podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, she's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because she's probably, she's probably my age, right, I'm 73.
Speaker 2:So she knows more than me about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we'll have to definitely have to get her on. That will be. That would certainly be a fun interview for sure, especially if she she grew up in Brooklyn. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Brooklyn not too far from where I'm living now. I just came here a few months ago, so I'm like re getting reacquainted with my roots here.
Speaker 1:So she must. She must be thrilled that you're down the block.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they tell me all kinds of stories of what it used to be like my poppy grandfather. He said he would play stick ball in the streets. You know, back in the back in the 1930s and everything is so different. Now he says yeah, it's yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 1:I can't begin to tell you how different it is. Yeah, you know it's. It's a. Really. I grew up in Queens, you know, and I grew up on college point. I don't know if you've heard of that, I don't know where that is, but back when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s college points of peninsula and nobody went there because there was nothing there. Yeah, it's hard to get there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a couple of buses went from flushing, but there was no reason to go there when I was going up, prior to that, in, like the well, in the 1800s, it was actually all the rich people would go there, you know for because it was the country. Basically they would get on a ferry from Manhattan and go to college, point, because it was, you know it was the country. And then, you know, leading up to World War Two, there were a lot of factories and things like that you know there was. There was one in particular, like you know, military plant, which you know most people would know when, and there was a, a rubber factory there and all that industry is, you know, it's all gone now. In fact, lily tulip, you know the paper cup company was there. Yeah, you know too, wow, so, so, yeah, interesting stuff. So now, so you, so you moved around a lot with the military then growing up, yeah, yeah, yeah, we definitely had to move a lot.
Speaker 2:I was born towards towards the end of my dad's career in the military, so I didn't, I only moved one out three. And when I was like like five or six then he retired and older siblings they had to move to a lot of places. It was like like Maryland Florida. Indiana like.
Speaker 2:I think, North Carolina somewhere, like, yeah, they moved all over the place. Yeah, yeah, that definitely takes a big toll on those military families to have to move everywhere, but I was able to keep myself busy with reading and writing. So, yeah, that's that's. That's what they work out.
Speaker 1:And what did? What was it that was evolved with the, with the missile programs and things like that, or what did he do?
Speaker 2:He was. He was a psychologist, oh really, yeah, oh yeah, I love my dad. Yeah, he was a psychologist and he he was one of the first people who was after 911. They were one of the first groups that was sent to them. The Middle East, they were out of a base in Kyrgyzstan that was like right, gave them like access to Afghanistan and he he was stationed there and helped helped everyone get established there and he there was a huge epidemic of PTSD and that was his career was focused on kind of reforming the way that we treat PTSD for some of these, these long term like forever wars that really really grind down on people after a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Wow, that's great. Yeah, you know it's it's got to be tough on because you know they, they, you know they kept rotating back and forth and back and forth. But you know people of my generation that grew up with my uncles and stuff like that, you know they went to World War Two and they were there for three, four, five years.
Speaker 1:You know, oh, yeah, yeah. And in fact my uncle one of my uncles was on. He was on one of the landing crafts at Iwo Jima. He drove, he was in the Navy and he drove one of those boats that that dropped off the Marines. That's pretty stressful. Well, he said they didn't know he would, he didn't know they were being shot at until the action because they thought nothing was left on the island. And he said that they heard the machine gun bullets come across the top of his head. And then they realize, yeah, they threw it back.
Speaker 2:I couldn't imagine that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my, yeah.
Speaker 2:So my great grandfather, who came from Italy yeah, I heard this in the book a little, but he, he was there at the outbreak of World War One and so he was living in Tunisia at the time and Tunisia was a French protectorate, so the French were kind of controlling it, but there were more Italian people living there than French.
Speaker 2:So there was always this tension that the French government was always worried that the Italians would take over, and so there was this tension between the French and the Italians. And then when World War I started, they weren't sure what sides the two countries would take during the war. And so now you have all these Italian people living in an area controlled by France and there's a lot of tension there. But then eventually, my great-grandfather he wrote to his cousin who was the prime minister, and then he was able to. He got placed as a barber in the military because he was training to become a barber in his uncle's shop, and then so he was sent to the front lines to cut the hair of the generals, all their fancy, like mustaches and mutton chops that they had back then that's a great job.
Speaker 2:That was his wartime story.
Speaker 1:Hey, you can't beat that yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, my cousin went to Vietnam and he got off the plane and they asked him. They asked who knows how to cook? He raised his hand and then they sent him to the mess hall and he had no idea what he was doing. And the sergeant says, well, why'd you raise your hand? And he said I figured it was better than getting shot at. He spent the whole, his whole tour in Vietnam in the office's mess in Saigon and they taught him how to cook and that's it. He came out and he opened the restaurant and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:But you know, I didn't realize until I saw it, doing some of this research, that there were a lot of Italians in Tunisia. And my grandfather, my mother's father, he, he actually, he was in the Italian army and fought in Libya. I guess I think it was 1910, 1911, just before, just before World War One started, and that's one of the stories why they came, supposedly. My grandmother told him you already fought in one war, you're not going to fight in another one. And they and they wound up coming to America because her brother was here. I think, yeah, yeah, so you. That's a fascinating history, you know, that's really cool stuff, you know. So, so the. So now the first book is is that story? Now you have some, you haven't, you have another one coming out right.
Speaker 2:Well, this one, yeah, my dear Antonio, it comes out on March 26.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's the new one, that's the new book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, this is a. It's a follows the life story of my great grandfather and great grandmother and it tells the story of how they, how they both grew up, were separated from their family and had to live in Tunisia and then they kind of got separated and then they both went their separate ways. She got engaged to someone else, he got married to someone else, but then somehow fate had some kind of plan and then they still ended up getting married when they were around 30, when they they ran into each other in Brooklyn of all places and against all odds, yeah, that's, that's.
Speaker 1:That's just crazy. So what was the first book, the book that's that's been published? What book is that?
Speaker 2:So my first book it was published in 2019 and that book is called Royal Beauty Bright and I wrote that. That one was pretty, pretty crazy to try and get that published because it was my first book published, but I wrote it in when I was a senior in high school You're making me sick here, yeah and that was a huge learning curve because then I went into college and.
Speaker 2:I really wanted to get it published. I didn't know how the process worked, so I I just sent out hundreds and hundreds of letters to people around get it published. And then I ended up putting a deal, getting a deal with this small like independent publisher that had like like two people working at it. And then they told me that they were planning on closing down the company and I was like, oh well, where goes my book? And then then we had this idea of trying to like sell the company to someone else to keep it going. And so I found this other publishing, this indie publishing company called and for a publishing group, and I had kind of known some people who worked with them in the past. So I put the two, two of them together and they ended up merging and then it saved my book and that's how I got published. So I was like I was like I'm gonna, this book's gonna get published one way or another.
Speaker 1:So yeah, boy, that's. You know that. You know that's a lesson for everybody that's young, you know, don't give up and, and you know you have to make your own way. You really do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but yeah, that one it's. That one was published in 2019. That was my senior year of college and that one is about. It's a historical fiction novel about the Christmas truce of 1914.
Speaker 2:For people who don't know, it was the first Christmas in World War One. They were, they expected that the war was going to be over by Christmas, but turned out that it was turning into this grinding much warfare but was just going to go on forever until one person ran out of money, basically, and then and then so the soldiers started to realize where this was going, and then, by Christmas, a lot of them decided that they didn't want to fight anymore. And so there were there are a lot of scattered events throughout the frontline where, like the French soldiers or the British soldiers, they would, they would just put their weapons down, and the German soldiers put their weapons down and they all just decided they didn't want to fight anymore. And then they they had a giant Christmas party in the, in the no man's land in between the two sides, and they they made like snowmen and plate soccer and you know, gave gifts and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:And it was totally bizarre because it was nope, it was not organized, it was totally spontaneous and grassroots and everyone kind of just decided on their own they didn't want to fight anymore and like nothing like that has ever happened on that scale before. And yeah, it was pretty wild. And so the book is about these, these two brothers. One of them is on the autism spectrum and he is mistakenly drafted to fight in the war. And then the other brother is estranged because they kind of had a falling out because of the the family difficulties of having to raise someone who's on the spectrum, and then so he has to redeem himself by going to get his brother back from the frontline. And then they all kind of cross paths on Christmas day when the truth happens.
Speaker 1:But, yeah that's that's. That's super cool. That's that's great and. I and it had you know at night I had to come up with this idea at such a young age. Yeah, cool.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I've always I've always wanted to write books, so I always have ideas that I'm working on, and I had these characters in my head for a long time and I Originally had written this story, but it was in a different setting. It was set, like some, in my town in the Midwest, and then I heard about this Christmas truce from my history class in high school and I was like, oh, this is perfect. And then so I I dropped them in that, in that backdrop, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just so. I wish I could do it. It was, it was real fun, and then yeah, it came out in November 2019.
Speaker 2:So I, in November and December 2019, I put together a little a little emotional campaign for it. I went to some bookstores and did some events, and the coolest thing, though, was that in Things, rockford Illinois, they have a historical Village there and they do they actually do a reenactment of the Christmas truce every year. So, yeah, it worked out perfectly, so I went there and. I just set up like a table I was selling my books and then they had the actual reenactment of the event and that was so cool.
Speaker 1:But yeah, that's super cool. Yeah, you know I, the only reenactment we ever went to. We lived in England for a couple years and we went to One of the roses reenactment which was, which was really pretty cool. And you know these guys, they were fine with like five and ten pound cannons and the whole ground was shaking like and I looked at my wife and said I can't imagine what these guys go through today. Yeah, of course your dad knows right, because they would. You know they're shooting these blank rounds, five and ten pounders and like it was just unbelievable that you know the sound and everything like that. But that's, that's really. That's really, that's really neat. That's really neat. And you've written a bunch of short stories and things too right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, I published about like four or five short stories and literary magazines. That's always fun. Um, that's, that's like a good way to like like polish up on some skills and if you have like an idea for a story you want to try out, but you don't want to like write a whole book. It's just like an easy way to test something out. So I enjoy writing short stories.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I'm a very bad writer. You know I do some things on my blog and you know I've done two books Not any literal literary acclaim, for sure, but I, you know, I wrote the most mostly for myself, and the first one was about, you know, my research and my family and then, and the second one was About my banking career, and that was easy because I knew everything, because it was my story and also I didn't have to do footnotes, which I had to do in the first book, which made me nuts, you know, oh, um, but you know, for somebody young like you or or, yeah, you know, somebody old like me who wants to write a book, what kind of what? You know what how would you advise them to start? I guess the short story is a good start, to write something like that to see if you could do something. But, um, what other advice would you give somebody?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, my advice would be first just just read a lot.
Speaker 2:Um books that are kind of contemporary, that have come out maybe within the last five years, that are kind of in the genre you want. I would just read as much as you can and try to get a feel for with the style and the voice, and and then after that it's, it's usually good to have like a plan for Like how you're gonna write it. Usually I try, I have a kind of like a method for writing where I'll I'll take the book and I'll split it up into chunks and Then each chunk I'll try to just write it as fast as I can. It doesn't have to be good, don't worry about it too much. But then I write it and I send it off to like like a dozen or so people, like friends and families and readers, and then I Talk to them carefully and ask her feedback and ask them questions and what they thought of it.
Speaker 2:But then I rewrite it and then and then I kind of just go through this process where I I just rapidly try to like make new iterations of each chunk of the book and that way I you can keep improving it as you go, and then that way you don't, you don't write the thing and then realize you made a mistake and you have to go back and rewrite it all. Yeah, and that way that method is an efficient way of doing it, because so sometimes, like, if you don't have a plan and you don't know where you're going, you can get stuck and then it takes you years and years to finish it. And then you know if you're working at that long scale, then, like there isn't enough time the day to like you know, finish everything.
Speaker 1:You know, if we're doing it that long and you know, I kind of did that a little bit with my first book, not that I knew what I was doing, but I I changed direction a couple of times, you know, because of how I wanted to include things and do things that, and you know what story I was trying to tell. And and you know it does, it does evolve, you know, as you go forward, like you said. So now, berens obviously isn't an Italian name. Have you researched, you know? You know your mom's family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so yeah, my name's Ryan Burns. It's his Irish name, yeah, but yeah, so my, so both of my my grandfathers are Irish, and then both my grandmothers on both sides are Italian, so there's a yeah, so this book is about my, my grandmother, like on my mom's side, about her family, but but yeah, there's also a lot of Irish heritage in my family too.
Speaker 1:But yeah, well, that's you know. There's obviously a lot of that in New York. You know a lot of they mixed and matched, especially back then. Did you find anything interesting with with the Irish family?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, there's a lot of cool stories about the Irish side of the family. We we actually found that they came from Ireland. On my, my mom's dad's side, they're Irish. They came from Ireland in like the 1800s or something and they the first place they settled was in New Finland, canada. It wasn't Canada at the time, but they settled in a little fishing village there and my mom actually went to go visit it over the summer and she took a lot of pictures and it looks very beautiful. It's on the coast of New Finland and there are all these these tiny little houses that Irish immigrants had lived in and they they had a little fishing village at the time and there's a lot of. She went there and there's a local historian who knew, had all the records and knew everything about the family. He told them all these stories and how there's like a street named after them and everything.
Speaker 1:And yeah, so.
Speaker 2:I maybe one day I'll write a book about them, that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yes, that's like that's, that's really cool. That's really, that's really neat. I was only in Ireland once. My son and I were in Dublin for a few days. Great, I mean really great place, and the only place to have a Guinness, that's for sure. Uh, tastes completely different in Ireland, like the olive oil in Italy. You know the, the Guinness in Ireland tastes completely different. Um, have you been able to get to Italy yet, or you haven't gone yet?
Speaker 2:Um, I've never been there, but I really want to go. We still have family there who I've talked to, have emailed them before, who still live in part of Niko. So I would really want to go visit Sicily one day and, uh, yeah, just meet my family, that'll be nice. I will need to have a translator or learn Italian or something, because I don't know. I don't know Italian myself, but I don't know it either.
Speaker 1:I'm sure I. You know, I've tried so many times to learn it. It's just starting in college and like, but my daughter, my daughter told me to try Duolingo, so I'm using that now and actually that's not bad, um, because it's it's what I? I'm a visual person, so it's, it's. It's got visual prompts and things like that. And unlike some of the other ones, um, they, they have you uh speak type read, uh, give you a story that you have to listen, so, so it's kind of a different way of learning.
Speaker 1:That's interesting and it's not, and it wasn't. It's not expensive either. I don't think it was 68 for the year or something like that. Well, um.
Speaker 2:I'll have to try that, then I can travel there.
Speaker 1:Uh yeah yeah, you get by you know, you know. Hand signals work point thing, you know. Uh, because I don't. Like I said, I don't speak it and Of course in the small towns a lot of times they don't speak any English. To big, the big places you get by and like on the subway, things are in English and Italian.
Speaker 1:So you know, kind of you kind of figure it out as you go along and the um, you know the menus are pretty familiar for the most part. Um, just don't, just don't ask for uh Cheese on your uh seafood dish, like my wife did. They don't like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah speaking of yeah, speaking of traveling to Italy, well, my, my parents visited Italy one time and they. I noticed that you and a previous episode of this podcast you interviewed Brett toman. Um is like a franciskin Tor gives franciskin tours. They actually did a tour through him. So yeah, my parents know him. They went on a tour with them to sisi.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, see, you know it's like such a small world. You know, you know you never know what you're gonna Find out or you know who you're gonna run into. Uh, that's really fascinating. Yeah, that was a good interview. He's a good guy. Um, and I haven't been. You know, we we've gone a few times, um, but we haven't been up north yet. So we said, the next time we go, the last two trips are kind of um, you know, looking for family and roots and things like that, but the next time we, we really want to, you know, go to piedmont and and maybe by the lakes and pizzer and places like that. You know the florens and you know that kind of thing, um, but uh, it's, you know, you, you could look at all the pictures of italy you want. It's not the same as when you're there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's it's such an interesting kind of diverse place. Um, you know, uh, so, um, so, you know, you know you have to go back, you definitely have to, you have to make the the trip back there. One of these one of these, but you have plenty of time, you, you get a lot more time than me, um, and uh, you know what? If you can, if you're eligible, you should, you should get your italian citizenship at some point. I wish I did it years ago, I heard, you can do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you know it's what's great about it especially. I'm doing it now mostly for my kids, because my kids are young one's 28, one's 26, um, and I'm doing it mostly for them because you know, if they want to visit, spend any time there, maybe someday retire there or something like that, you know you get all the benefits of an regular italian citizen, um, once you go and and school is Peanuts compared to here, I mean it's yeah, yeah, um. But I have a friend who she lives there now. She's an italian citizen, she has their equivalent of medicare and you know she's entitled to every single benefit that any other italian citizens against. So you know, in that sense it's really really good. Uh, and especially if you know if you ever wanted to buy a house or open a business or Spend more than three months there and write a book, you know, spend a year there and write a book you have your italian citizenship.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, well, that'd be nice yeah it's a, it's a good thing to have and you know, then you can learn some italian. Well, this has been, this has been a lot of fun before. So before we go, um, where can people find you, find your book?
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, so my book is, uh, my dear antonio, here. It comes out on march 26. You can buy it On amazoncom burns, a noblecom, bookshopcom, um, and if you want to learn more, you can follow me at ryan burns writes that's my On facebook. You can look up ryan burns writes on instagram. You can look up ryan burns writes Um, also youtube. It's the. It's the same name for all the platforms, so you can. You can look me up there, um, in my website too. But yeah, uh, I'm looking forward to it and uh, yeah, I'm really excited to see how this book campaign turns out.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I'm sure it'll go well, and you know I'll do anything I can to help you get it out there, that's for sure. No question about that, oh, thanks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I hope you can talk again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, I gotta get your grandparents on, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah All right, thanks again.