The Motta brothers raised vegetables and sold them in Bingham Canyon. They'd load their crops on a horse-drawn wagon and set off at midnight to be in place to sell by dawn. In 1922, Steve returned to his village in Italy and married a young woman he had known only slightly, Veronica Rocca, and brought her to Utah.

Steve bought land where present-day Cottonwood High School is, and that's where he and Veronica raised their children.

Uzelac and Motta have both been widowed and now live together again, near the land where they grew up. When they remember the farm of their youth, they recall the first tractor their father bought. They remember their mother, a sweet and hospitable and religious woman, who sang and prayed all day long as she went about her household chores. She also worked in the fields in the summer when the workload was heaviest.

Uzelac loves being Italian because her parents loved her so well, she says. The heritage and language she never wants to forget include her mother's little sayings, such as this one she'd use when her daughter did a task or a favor, "Until you are better paid — thank you."

The purpose of bringing family mementos to Ferragosto, and of the film Milner is helping to produce "is to tell the community our story, what the immigrants went through and how things have evolved," Motta says.

Frank Tremea believes the Ferragosto will draw Italians from Ogden, people whose ancestors, like his, came from northern Italy. Tremea tells his children that it doesn't matter that they don't speak Italian, it is still their duty to keep the heritage alive. He hopes they will become leaders in Trentini, an organization for Canadians and Americans of northern Italian descent. (Although, actually, Tremea adds, you don't have to be Italian to join, you just have to like things Italian.)

Before the Trentini, there was the Friendly Club in Ogden. Through the Friendly Club, Italians held parties and picnics and made new immigrants feel welcome and loaned each other money to buy land or start a business. Tremea was only 3 months old in 1937 when his parents helped start the Friendly Club.

Meanwhile, Michael Homer believes the Ferragosto might be an opportunity for Utahns who may have thought their ancestors were French, to find out they were really Italian. Homer's grandfather came in 1854, with the first wave of Italian immigrants. James Bertoch was 16 and came with four brothers and sisters, two of whom died on the journey across the Plains.

Bertoch was born in a small French-speaking Protestant community in the Piedmont region and was converted to the LDS faith in the 1850s, after Lorenzo Snow opened the Italian Mission in what was then the kingdom of Sardinia.

Last names such as Pons or Cardon or Bertoch may not sound Italian, but they are, Homer says. After 1861, when the Italian provinces were unified, people gradually stopped speaking French in Sardinia.