The Philadelphia Eagles are in this year’s Super Bowl because of a superior running game, along with one of the most improved defenses in the NFL since last year. Anecdotally, throughout the playoffs, they have simply appeared bigger, faster and stronger than most of their opponents.
But, according to some industry experts—like my mother-in-law—the Eagles are also dominating for one important reason: They are more Italian than any other team in the NFL.
No offense to Tommy DeVito and the New York Giants, who have managed to corner the market on the Italian NFL subculture, but recent (sauce-covered) breadcrumbs supporting the theory have been unignorable.
• On a January episode of Chris Long’s Green Light podcast, former Eagles defensive tackle Beau Allen relayed a story about how he was waiting to see Jason Kelce in the staff locker room and was pacified by a readily available cannoli.
• Vic Fangio, already famously quoted for refusing to provide his significant other with his family meatball recipe, when asked recently about cornerback Darius Slay, compared him to a “fine dago red wine.” While dago is considered an offensive slur toward Italian people, it is also commonly recognized as a type of fruity red wine that is coveted by older generations of Italians.
After speaking to more than a dozen coaches, players and community members, though, there is far more to the story.
According to NFL data shared with Sports Illustrated, no team has requested more Italian flags for the league’s cultural heritage initiative than the Eagles (and the Eagles are tied for the most, alongside the New England Patriots, in total flag patches of any country). Three of Philadelphia’s coaches—head coach Nick Sirianni; pass-game coordinator Kevin Patullo; and Dom DiSandro, the team’s chief of security, special advisor to the general manager and head of gameday coaching operations—wear the Italian flag on their visors or pullovers. That list, however, does not include Fangio, the team’s defensive coordinator, whose family arrived from Italy back in 1919 from Castiglione, a coastal town on the peninsula’s northwest side (Fangio also replaced Matt Patricia, another proud Italian from the Eagles’ 2023 staff, who sported the country’s flag as an assistant with the Patriots). Joe Pannunzio, the team’s assistant special teams coordinator, and others formulate the basis of a staff that redefines the word famiglia at the NFL level.
For those outside the building, the staff serves as a cultural bridge to an area that contains the densest population of Italians outside of the country itself. For those inside the building, their shared culture provides a kind of driving ethos, a deeper bond during the hardest and most isolating moments of the season. And, as one former coach put it, plenty of occasions where the Italian members of the staff have to explain others:
“We’re not yelling at each other, we’re just talking.”
This is the story of the Philadelphia Aquile and the people they inspire.
“... You’re speaking to Tony.”
It’s a Friday night, nine days before the Eagles will compete in Super Bowl LIX, and the hostess transfers the call to the back room of Aroma on 3rd, an authentic Italian restaurant about a 13-minute drive from the Eagles’ NovaCare Complex. Tony Cardillo moved to this country back in 1974 and started working in the food service industry, owning and operating restaurants for all his adult life. It wasn’t long before he befriended a hard-working bricklayer, the father of a 7-year-old named Dom DiSandro.
In a few minutes, the man most NFL fans know as “Big Dom” will swing by Aroma on his way home from work at the Eagles’ complex and pick up some dinner. His favorite, Tony says, is the mascarpone gnocchi with lobster (it’s named after him) and, for dessert, a hot and cold, which is an espresso chocolate bar with Italian gelato on top. In the meantime, Tony tells me some stories. When he brings up the names of his favorite Eagles coaches, his orchestral command of the accent brings out musical sounds and notes one couldn’t possibly conjure from a plain English reading of their last name.
Tony’s place is one of a handful of culinary refuges for Eagles with Italian ancestry who might feel a little homesick and in the mood to be overstuffed like a grandson again. Dotted around the city, they are like little safehouses facilitated by DiSandro, where one can enter, the menu is swiftly removed from the table and the gracious diner is fed to the point of exhaustion. It gives a big city a more condensed feel, like that of an old, familiar neighborhood where most of the homes housed some kind of relative.
The first time Pannunzio showed up at the door, Tony asked: Who sent you?
“Dom,” Pannunzio replied.
“Sit down here,” Tony said.
“He comes back three minutes later and says: ‘I just got off the phone with Dom.’ Then he kisses me on both cheeks of mine, and we’ve been best friends ever since,” Pannunzio says. Pannunzio brings his family there for Christmas and Easter.
Tony adds: “Our culture, we’re a different kind of people. We don’t just shake hands. We hug and kiss like we’re brothers and sisters. When these guys have the same culture you do, you go above and beyond in support.”
As if having a dimly lit, secret sanctum full of delicious, freshly made delicacies was not on brand enough, Sports Illustrated polled a number of current and former coaches about the most Italian part of the Eagles’ staff. Within those answers, a picture of the lovingly stereotypical and the beautifully nostalgic:
• After victories this year, apparently at the behest of Fangio, the team blasts “Volare (Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu)” by Dean Martin on the team bus en route home. Volare is the Italian word for fly—Volare, Eagles Volare?—and was a song that multiple coaches remember being played in their houses while growing up.
• Patullo wore a black-and-white bomber jacket—procured by DiSandro, of course—that says Italian Stallion on the back when he exited the team plane upon arrival in New Orleans for the Super Bowl, and he plans to wear it on the field before the game. Yes, it’s from Rocky. Last year, Patullo wore a Rocky shirt before almost every away game underneath his warmup suit.
• Coaches have gifted each other red, white and green slipper slides; Italian horn keychains and bottles of red wine. At least one has sported a T-shirt that says “wooden spoon survivor.”
• For the first few years of Sirianni’s tenure, the entire staff ate takeout from Angelo’s on 9th Street in South Philadelphia on the day before games (the ritual changed this year due to the Week 1 Brazil game, which threw off their normal schedule). The cash-only joint also has a tiny room in which the coaching staff can converge while a massive line swells outside (that Cooper DeJean still has to wait in, apparently). They take down pizza and subs stuffed with Genoa salami, cotegina, hot capicola, imported ham and mild provolone.
• Big Dom, who sported a glimmering gold necklace with an Italian pendant during the team’s opening night festivities Monday, has the coaches’ lockers stuffed full of an unfathomable amount of Italian food and pastries for post-game enjoyment. Among the most popular and sought-after items are chicken cutlet subs, ricotta cookies and cannolis.
• Fangio still will not share his meatball recipe, though some coaches hope a Super Bowl victory will change his mind.
During the incubator of a long season, Pannunzio says, it can feel like one doesn’t have a family. Love, at least from the outside, is contingent on some kind of result from a game. But bringing a piece of his culture to work chips away at the hard edges.
And because of that infectiousness, there seem to be converts.
“I mean, everyone at this point thinks they’re Italian on our staff,” Patullo says. “It’s fun.”
On Sunday, Nick LaGuardia plans to leave his home and enter a state of near isolation on the second floor of the Sons of Italy building in Hammonton, N.J. The upper tier, which contains a sofa and a television, is lovingly nicknamed by regulars as “The 700 level,” a reference to another Philadelphia icon, old Veterans Stadium.
Hammonton is still home to the densest population of Italians outside of Italy, and LaGuardia is the past president of the fraternal Italian organization.
When his beloved team hired an Italian head coach and an Italian defensive coordinator, and had DiSandro, another proud Italian, as a promoted face of the organization, “We absolutely notice it,” LaGuardia says.
“We’re proud of our heritage, we’re proud of our traditions and when one of us makes good on something, we all celebrate it.”
LaGuardia noted some of the stories that have been relayed about Sirianni over the years. How he’ll handwrite notes to players, how he surrounds himself with his own family and engrains them into the team, how he’s always seen wrapping some player into a near-aggressive embrace. To him, that’s the real and tangible part of the culture seeping through. This visceral love; an Italian’s unique ability to make a stranger feel as if they’re a part of something.
“They play for each other,” LaGuardia says. “There’s a lot of stars, but they play together. It starts from Nick.”
Last year, both Sirianni and DiSandro were awarded the National Italian American Foundation Colangelo Sports Excellence Award. Salvatore Patti, the mid-Atlantic vice president of the organization, said that the honor is given out to those who have a tangible effect in the community, but also people who wear their heritage on their sleeve. In this case, literally.
“It’s just great to see people who are embracing our culture,” Patti says. “You look at sports, you look at all these different teams and you just don’t always have it. We have it in Philadelphia.”
Sirianni is the most successful Italian-American head coach since Vince Lombardi. The 56 years from Lombardi’s final game to Sirianni’s second Super Bowl feels like a small eternity, but not for those molded by the stories of mothers and fathers who came before them. Hammonton and the Philadelphia region were a beacon for Italian immigrants who came to work in the shoe factories and suit manufacturers. Sirianni is just a few generations removed from Calabria and Sicily, and from a family clothing store in Kane, Penn. Fangio, from his father’s tailoring shop in Scranton. DiSandro, who grew up with Italian as his first language and called his parents “the epitome of the American dream.”
In that way, the patch means something more. More than the music, more than the food, more than the culture. It’s a realization of some long-ago dream; some unfathomable grasp at progress.
Frank Mattei, an NIAF board member at the event honoring Sirianni and DiSandro last year called it a “light.”
“You’re not just being honored tonight for what you have accomplished in sports,” he told both of them. “But really, how you’ve achieved your success.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Philadelphia Famiglia: How Italian Culture Bonds the Eagles Amid a Super Bowl Run.
