The Italian Legacy in the Dominican Republic

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THE ITALIAN LEGACY IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 512
De Dios; member and collaborator for the Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (NPH) Home School Association;
member of the Italian Center; member of the Italian Academy of Cuisine; member of the Santo Domingo
Country Club, Club Deportivo Naco, Club Náutico de Santo Domingo and the Santo Domingo Tennis Club;
member of Comitato Italiani all´Estero, (Il Com ; and President of the board of directors of Casa de Italia.
He is a Commander for the Order of the Star of Italy.
• Giancarlo Summa
An Italian journalist and political scientist, Summa has worked professionally in Latin America for more than
three decades. He is the author of essays and articles on politics and communications published in several
countries. He completed a master’s degree in Latin American Studies at University of Sorbonne Nouvelle
Paris 3, and he is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Since 2016 he has
been the Director of the United Nations Information Center for Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic,
headquartered in Mexico City. He has been compiling documents and information for many years on the
history of Ilio Capozzi.
• Bernardo Vega
Vega is the author of 34 books on Dominican history, six of which have won national awards. An additional
two have been published in Europe. As an archeologist, he was the director of the Museum of Dominican
Man, and he is the author of seven books on archeology. He graduated as an economist from the Wharton
School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, and he worked at the Dominican Central Bank for a
period of 14 years as an economic adviser to its Governor, a senior member of the Monetary Board, and ulti-
mately as its Governor. He has represented the country at multiple international economic conferences. He
was the President of the Dominican Academy of History and the Dominican Society of Bibliophiles, as well as
senior executive for the Dominican Cultural Fundación, a publishing house with more than 40 years of history
publishing the works of Dominican and foreign authors. He was a professor at the Autonomous University of
Santo Domingo and Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra. He was the Ambassador to the White
House and the director of the newspaper El Caribe; he also presided over the INTEC board of regents. In 2016,
he went to Columbia University as a visiting professor.
• Wenceslao Vega Boyrie
Vega Boyrie is a retired lawyer and notary. He is an academic at the Dominican Academy of History, and he
served as a Member of its Board of Directors during the 2001-2004 period. He is a former Law History Pro-
fessor at the Catholic University of Santo Domingo (UCSD) and winner of the 1979 Siboney Award for his
essay titled “History of the Dominican Colonial Law” and the 1986 National History award for “History of the
Dominican Judicial Power.”
• Julia A. Vicioso
Vicioso is a historian and Dominican diplomat at the United Nations agencies in Rome. She graduated from
Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña in Santo Domingo with a degree in Architecture in 1983, with
her first thesis on the History of Architecture from this university. She received a master’s degree and a doc-
torate in History and Monument Conservation at Sapienza University of Rome. She has worked in diplomacy,
paleography and archival studies at the Vatican, and in conservation at Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in
Rome. She has been a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation - Latin America and Caribbean Fel-
low, and a recipient of the Samuel H. Kress Post-Graduate Research Fellowship, among other distinctions. She
is a historian for the San Giovanni dei Fiorentini basilica church in Rome, and a member of the Medici Archive
Project Council in Florence and of The International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration
of Cultural Property (ICCROM) in Rome.