Personal Interests

 My name is Vanessa Carlone and as you can tell by the vowel at the end of my last name, I’m Italian. My family migrated to America from Campobasso, Italy.  Whenever we have a family gathering, my grandparents always reminisce about growing up on the farm and the simple life they lived by making all of their food from scratch.  Every so often, there would be chatter about the  Italian Mafia  as my grandparents and their brothers and sisters had stories related to the mob violence that was occurring at the time. Even though it didn’t affect my family personally, it would be all over the news and everybody knew about it. My whole life I had been intrigued by this criminal lifestyle. I always wanted to know more about it and I never thought that a reality TV show would be made about it. I’m usually on top of my game and know almost every reality show that VH1 comes up with. However, with the reality TV series, Mob wives, it was actually my mom who told me to watch it. Before watching it, I was skeptical as to how women who were either married or divorced to men associated with the Staten Island Mob were going to be portrayed. My assumptions on this show before watching it was that it was going to be about women complaining about when their next manicure or tanning appointment was. I was completely wrong with the whole concept of this show. After watching the first episode I was instantly hooked. It was very entertaining to watch these four women; Karen Gravano, Renee Graziano, Carla Facciolo and Drita D’avanzo  verbally argue and get into physical altercations with each over problems with their friendships, ex-boyfriends and ex husbands. I can honestly say that this was one of the few reality TV shows that kept me at the edge of my seat anxiously waiting to see the previews for next week’s episode.

For every new Sunday episode, I would sit with my mom on the couch in the summer and watch it.  During commercials, my mom would explain to me the background story of these men who were arrested for mob related crimes as she remembered hearing about it on the news.  I had previously not known anything about these mob busts in Staten Island so hearing the background stories of the husbands made the show more interesting to me.  I believe the main social message of this show is loyalty to the mob lifestyle. Each woman is loyal to their husband’s lifestyle in their own way, but the person that I could relate to the most was Drita D’avano. Unlike the other three women who are of Italian Decent, Drita is Albanian but is married to an Italian man. She was the only one who was still married to her husband, Lee.  She was able to maintain a relationship with her husband while he was in jail via phone calls all while taking care of their two young daughters. I describe myself as a strong female and I admire her most for her strength to keep dating Lee and her devotion to stay faithful to him. This clip shows her dedication to their marriage as she poses for a photo shoot to make pictures to send to Lee.  This youtube video is a preview of season one and it is what attracted me as well as many other viewers to the show.