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ITALIAN JOURNALISTS
As a young man, he was a member of Los Nuevos, a youth association from La Vega, his hometown. As
a member of this group, he wrote in newspapers such as
La Palabra
and
El Progreso
as well as in the
Los Nuevos
journal.
When he moved to Santo Domingo, he covered sports—mostly baseball-related stories—for
La Nación
. In
1962, after the Trujillo regime dissolved, he cofounded the cultural, political, socialist, and nationalist journal
Ahora
with Rafael Molina Morillo, also from La Vega.
However, the pinnacle of his career was reached when he was working on the agricultural supplement of
El Caribe
, which was started in 1981.
7
Margarita Billini Bernal, the daughter of Billini Ruse’s fifteenth child, Agustín Billini Hernández, married
Antinoe Fiallo, and they became the parents of
José Antinoe Fiallo Billini
(1943–). Fiallo Billini is a lawyer
by trade, but he works as both a journalist and a university professor of sociology and history. As a university
student, he served on the board of a newspaper called
Ataque
, and he later had a radio show called “Matutino
Alternativo” (Alternative Morning) for seven years. He has also worked as a columnist for academic journals
such as
Ecos, Estudios Sociales,
and
Ciencia y Sociedad
; for the newspaper of the Dominican Liberation Party,
Vanguardia del Pueblo
; and for national newspapers such as
Listín Diario
and
Nuevo Diario
.
8
The Billinis, in terms of both time period and prominence, were succeeded by
the Pelleranos
. They were
not journalists
per se
, but rather promoters, owners, and managers of various media outlets from the late nine-
teenth century to the present.
According to genealogist Julio Amable González Hernández, a scholar of the Pelleranos, Giovanni Battista
Pellerano Costa (1806–1880) and María Teresa Costa (1806–1880) from Santa Margherita Ligure in the region
of Liguria, Italy, emigrated to the Dominican Republic around 1849 and had a son named Vincenzo Benedetto,
who married María de Belén Alfau Sánchez in 1859. Their son Arturo Joaquín Pellerano Alfau, born in 1864,
also had a large family that included many journalists and media entrepreneurs and a founder of
Listín Diario
.
9
The main entrance
of the
Listín Diario
headquarters; in
the foreground,
the bust of Arturo
Joaquín Pellerano
Alfau, founder of the
newspaper.
© Courtesy of Listín Diario
Photograph by Robert
Vásquez