By Kelsey Durham
A family in Little Neck is gearing up to celebrate a milestone for their beloved matriarch, decades after she first laid down their roots in Queens.
Maria Regina Lucarelli will turn 100 April 13, and her three daughters have planned to celebrate the occasion in style. Lucarelli will be the guest of honor at the birthday party Sunday as her family gathers to look back on the life she made for herself and her children when she first came to New York more than 60 years ago.
Born in the small Italian village of Turitto in 1914, Lucarelli was the oldest of four children and grew up learning to care for her loved ones from a young age, said her middle daughter, Chiara Ceglian.
In the late 1930s, her family came to America to start a new life in what Ceglian said her mother called the “land of opportunity” and Lucarelli began working as a seamstress in order to help her family make money.
A few months later, she returned to Italy to check on her family’s property and soon found herself stuck in her native country just as World War II was breaking out across Europe. What Lucarelli expected to be a short trip turned into more than a decade-long stay in Italy as she waited for the war to end before she could return to America.
“This part of her life is the stuff movies are made from,” Ceglian said.
While stranded in Italy, she met Filippo Lucarelli, a young musician who worked as an orchestra conductor, whom she later married. Together, they had two children, Rosa and Chiara, before returning to New York in 1953 to reunite with the rest of the family.
Lucarelli worked as a seamstress in Manhattan’s Garment District, which Ceglian said led to her having a successful career as a fashion designer on Fifth Avenue, designing dresses for high-end retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman.
In 1956, the Lucarellis had a third daughter, Agnes, and eventually decided to move to Kings Park, L.I., where Ceglian vividly remembers spending her childhood growing up in an authentic Italian household.
“My mother was a great baker and an excellent cook,” she said. “She was always making breads and hundreds of jars of tomato sauce using tomatoes we grew out back. It was really a special time.”
After retiring to Florida many years later, Lucarelli’s husband died in 1991, and she moved back up to New York to live with Ceglian in Whitestone in 2009. Today, she lives in the Brandywine Assisted Living community in Little Neck, and although she is now battling dementia, her daughter said she is still the same vibrant woman she has always known and loved, and never fails to be the life of the party.
“She has such a zest for life, and I think her longevity had a lot to do with her outlook on life,” Ceglian said. “She has always been positive. The two things she’s taking with her up to 100, even though she’s forgotten a lot, are her maternal instincts and her spirituality.”
When Lucarelli celebrates her birthday Sunday, her family will be by her side to share the milestone with her and to remember the amazing life Ceglian said her mother has packed into her 100 years. She said she has recently reminded her mother that she has a special birthday coming up, but she is still looking forward to her reaction when she realizes the party surrounding her is for her 100th birthday.
“She wouldn’t believe it,” Ceglian said, “but mostly she would be upset that everyone knew her real age.”
Reach reporter Kelsey Durham at 718-260-4573 or by e-mail at kdurham@cnglocal.com.
