Alessandria, Italy -- Even if Italian-Americans aren't rare in Milwaukee, ones with roots in the Piemonte region of northwest Italy are fairly hard to come by. Other than some who arrived here via other cities -- like me -- there is only a group of the descendants of emigrants from the Canavese area near Turin that arrived a century ago to work in the Bay View rolling mill and a few modern migrants living here for work reasons.

So, when people outside of Brew City see that I've got a Web site about the region and do a lot of work to promote the Piemontese culture, they are perhaps rightfully surprised. Because, here, I'm part of a very small club.

Over the weekend, at the Third International Conference of the Piemontesi in the World, held in Alessandria, Italy, I met like-minded people from pretty much everywhere. There were Piemontesi from South Africa, China, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, England, France, Russia and seemingly everywhere in between; 19 countries in all. Besides me, representing the U.S. were folks from New York, San Francisco and San Diego.

This tower of Babel was united in most cases by the Italian language -- which was the language of the conference -- but in almost every case by the Piemontese language, in all its glorious dialects, from the "official" Turin-based tongue, to the dialects from provinces like Alessandria, Asti and Novara.

At the closing dinner on Saturday, I brought along three friends from the group Ariondassa, which has played twice in Milwaukee -- at Festa Italiana 2005 and 2006 -- and the event was transformed from a nice dinner to a rousing sing-along and dance in the style of the region's traditional "piola" or taverns, where music always was served alongside a bottle of Barbera.

For two short days we were all home together, in the land of our ancestors and our contemporary cousins, and we showed the Piemontesi in Piemonte that although we've moved away, we haven't forgotten our history.