At Friends Farm in Lafayette, the Potenza Committee brought together Italian food, Colorado agriculture, music and an extraordinary collection of friends for an evening that captured what Sister Cities is all about.
There are evenings that raise money, evenings that celebrate culture, and evenings that somehow become something more. Saturday night’s Farm-to-Table Dinner at Friends Farm in Lafayette was decidedly the latter.
As the late-August light settled over the farm, guests wandered among the growing fields, enjoyed fresh ingredients, filled their glasses and found their places around tables set for an evening that seemed, for a few hours, to shorten the distance between Colorado and southern Italy. At the center of it all was Potenza—not simply as a place on a map, but as something the committee wanted its guests to experience through food, hospitality, music and conversation.
Following the success of its inaugural Farm-to-Table Dinner in 2025, the Potenza Committee returned to Friends Farm with the same wonderfully simple idea: invite people to participate in the meal from the ground up. Members helped gather ingredients from the farm for Chef Federica and those ingredients become dinner for all to sit down together to enjoy the result, accompanied by live music from FreeStyle.
From Potenza, With Love
At the heart of the evening was Federica Perrone, a trained chef and native of Potenza who transformed ingredients grown just steps from the dinner table into the evening’s meal. This wasn’t simply Italian food served at an Italian-themed event. It was food prepared by someone who grew up in the city Denver calls its sister, sharing a piece of her home with people thousands of miles away.
There is something particularly intimate about sharing the food of your hometown. Recipes carry geography with them, but they also carry families, childhoods, celebrations and memories. Federica brought all of that to the table. Guests had been invited into the experience from the beginning, gathering seasonal ingredients from Friends Farm before they made their way into her kitchen and ultimately back onto their plates. The result was a meal that felt less like catering and much more like hospitality.
It was exactly the kind of cultural exchange that Sister Cities hopes to create: personal, authentic and memorable.
The Art of Hosting
If Federica told the story of Potenza through the meal, Pietro Simonetti gave the evening its voice. As host and one of the driving forces behind the revitalized Potenza Committee, Pietro and Katie Simonetti moved easily among the tables, making introductions, welcoming longtime DSCI friends and drawing newcomers into the story of his city.
Under Pietro’s leadership, and with the enthusiasm and commitment of the entire Potenza Committee, the relationship has found new energy. Saturday evening demonstrated what can happen when a Sister City committee moves beyond meetings and creates experiences that allow people to encounter another culture personally. With FreeStyle playing, conversations moving from one end of the tables to the other and guests lingering over dinner, the evening began to feel less like a scheduled nonprofit event and more like an Italian gathering transplanted to a Colorado farm.
The guest list reflected the remarkable network of relationships that has grown around Denver Sister Cities International. Margaret Griffes, joined Riccardo Mazzeo and members Anissa Madrill of the Dante Alighieri Society of Pueblo, RJ Fernandez, Michael Frank, Greg Ursetta, and friends including Ann Griffiths, and Paige Yungstrom, of the Potenza Committee, while several of Denver’s newest friends from the Dnipro, Ukrainian community came out to support the evening as well.
Among them were Mark and Anne Dillen and Marina Dubrova, who have been deeply involved in building Denver’s new Friendship City relationship with Dnipro, Ukraine. Their presence seemed particularly appropriate: people helping nurture one of Denver’s newest international relationships had come to celebrate a community sustaining one of its established Sister City partnerships.
Mark Dillen has spent much of his professional life building connections across borders. A former Senior Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State, his assignments included American embassies in Moscow, Berlin, Bonn, Rome, Belgrade and Sofia. Today, as Public Affairs Director for Ukrainians of Colorado and a leader of the American Coalition for Ukraine, he continues that international work much closer to home. His involvement with Sister Cities stretches back decades, including helping establish a partnership between Sofia, Bulgaria, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Yet on Saturday evening, none of those relationships required an embassy, a formal delegation or an official ceremony. They required only an invitation and a place at the table.
A Taste of Potenza, Made in Denver
The evening was made even more special by the generosity of Spero Winery, a longtime, family-owned Denver winery that shared a wonderful selection of wines for the Farm-to-Table dinner, including a beautiful Barbera that was a perfect complement to the evening.
But Spero Winery’s connection to this gathering goes much deeper than the wine in our glasses.
Winemaker Clyde Spero learned the art of winemaking from his father, Gaetano Spero, who came to the United States from Potenza, Italy, at just 13 years old. Gaetano eventually settled in Colorado, where he continued the farming and winemaking traditions his family had carried for generations. He made wine each fall for his family, and Clyde grew up learning those same Old World techniques from his father. (5280)
Clyde and his wife, June, carried that tradition forward, eventually creating Spero Winery in Denver. Today, the family-owned winery continues to make wines in the Italian tradition, using grapes sourced from Colorado as well as California. Barbera, Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Malbec and Syrah are among the reds that have been part of Spero’s collection. (Colorado Wine)
There is even a family story behind Spero’s “Vino è Buono” — “Wine is good” tradition. The winery’s label features Clyde’s father, Gaetano, raising a glass, while the phrase itself was inspired by Clyde’s Uncle Ventuda in Italy. (5280)
For an evening celebrating the relationship between Denver and Potenza, it was hard to imagine a more fitting wine—or a more fitting Denver family—to have at our table.
We are deeply grateful to Clyde, June and the Spero family for their generosity and for sharing not only their wines, but a Denver story rooted in immigration, family, tradition and a connection to Potenza that has endured across generations.
A Traveler Finds His Way to the Table
Another guest brought a distinctly international perspective to the evening. Ralph Iantosca, founder of luxury travel company The Expeditionist, has built a career creating extraordinary journeys around the world. His work occupies the rarefied end of travel—private-jet expeditions, luxury cruises, African safaris, exceptional lodges and highly personalized itineraries designed for travelers seeking experiences far beyond the ordinary.
Iantosca has traveled extensively himself and has been recognized repeatedly by Condé Nast Traveler as a top travel specialist. One special tour he suggested for the group actually included a photograph of Mark and Anne's home along a colorful and beautiful shoreline in a Croatian city that was once the land of Italy. It was one more example of the unexpected connectedness this group has.
The Conversation Became the Event
The setting was beautiful, the music set the tone and Federica’s meal gave everyone a reason to gather, but as the evening unfolded, the conversations themselves became part of the experience. People moved between tables and introductions led naturally to other introductions. Discussions about Italy gave way to conversations about Ukraine, travel, families, education and the unexpected ways relationships between cities can become relationships between people.
That may be citizen diplomacy in its most natural form. It doesn’t always begin with a mayor, a proclamation or an international delegation. Sometimes it begins when someone asks, “Tell me about where you’re from,” and then stays long enough to listen to the answer.
The evening was also designed with a very tangible purpose. Proceeds from the Farm-to-Table Dinner will help create scholarships for Colorado students participating in a future exchange with Potenza. Last year’s exchange gave six students the opportunity to travel to Italy on full scholarships, live with host families and experience the country not simply as visitors, but as members of a community.
There is a lovely symmetry to what happened Saturday night. Ingredients grown on a Colorado farm became an Italian dinner. That dinner helped raise money for student scholarships. Those scholarships will eventually carry young people from Colorado to Potenza, where they will sit around entirely different tables with Italian families, experience the traditions of another community and begin conversations and friendships of their own.
A Love Letter Between Cities
Sister City relationships are often represented by official documents, proclamations, delegations and photographs of people shaking hands. Those things matter, but they are not the relationship itself. The relationship lives in the spaces between them—in the family that welcomes a student into its home, the volunteer who spends months organizing an exchange, the chef who prepares the food she remembers from home, the Ukrainian friends who arrive to support an Italian committee, and the traveler who has explored much of the world but still finds something worth discovering around a farm table in Lafayette.
Saturday evening felt, in the end, like a love letter between cities. Not one written on official stationery, but one written with food and music, friendship and generosity, and a table with room for someone new.
For one late-summer evening, Potenza didn’t feel quite so far from Denver. And the Potenza Committee didn’t have to explain citizen diplomacy.
They served it for dinner.
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