Last summer, in anticipation of a fall trip to France and northern Italy, I Googled each city I’d be visiting and “Rochester” to see if I might find local connections. “Paris” and “Avignon” produced no hits, but Googling “Genoa, Italy” turned up this Wikipedia entry: “Marco Bucci (politician).”

Who, I wondered, is Marco Bucci and what is his connection to Rochester? Bucci, it turns out, is the current mayor of Genoa—birthplace of Christopher Columbus and today a vibrant city of population 675,000. Before he entered politics, Bucci worked for 17 years at Kodak and the former Kodak division now called Carestream Health.