one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughters sits on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
The youngest of seven children and the only girl, Pelosi grew up like royalty. Her father Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. was a member of Congress when she was born, in 1940, and the mayor of Baltimore by the time she was 7. When young Nancy wasn’t being ferried to a Catholic girls’ school, she was attending her father’s ceremonial events or helping him get out the vote. Her father’s ancestors had immigrated from Genoa, Venice and Abruzzo, her mother’s from the southern Italian city of Campobasso. The family lived in a three-story brick row house in the heart of Little Italy, a blue collar community near Baltimore’s industrial waterfront. The house appears vacant now; Pelosi points it out to me as we drive by. (We had planned to take a walking tour, but it’s a cold day, and she detests the cold.) A few blocks over, there are hipster restaurants and lofts, but in this part of town, the corners still feature traditional pasta houses.