COMMUNITY
Erika Fabbri stands with a three-panel print of her home- town Vicenza, Italy, at a Cobblestone Farms park in March.
Desert convert From Italy to Maricopa, Erika Fabbri finds home in Maricopa BY MONICA D. SPENCER AND ELIAS WEISS
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once unsettled her had, over time, become part of the place she loved. That sense of translation, of explaining one world to another, seems to be what mattered most to her about the Italian article. She told the reporter in Vicenza the connection felt almost like creating “sister cities,” introducing Maricopa to readers in northern Italy while carrying a little bit of Vicenza with her here. Vicenza, she said, is a city of Andrea Palladio, layered with monumental architecture, art and history so old it can be hard for Americans to grasp. She remembers summers with her grandfather in an art gallery inside a deconsecrated church built around the year 1100, and school trips where students learned not just what a building was, but the stories behind it. That kind of inherited place memory is different from life in Maricopa, she said, where much of the city feels new. But she now sees value in that too. Maricopa may not offer a medieval piazza or Palladian Basilica, but it has something else: room to grow, room to breathe and room to become home. For now, Fabbri said, this is where her family’s life is rooted. Her husband works here as an engineer. Her son is pursuing a master’s degree in clinical counseling. And Fabbri herself was recently elected vice president of the board for a Christian private school in town. The woman who once wept on the drive into Maricopa now finds herself doing something very different: explaining its beauty to people an ocean away.
They married, raised their son and lived in Italy for years before eventually moving to Texas. Fabbri said she became a U.S. citizen in 2019, the same year the family relocated to Maricopa for her husband’s job after his military retirement. The adjustment was rough. In Italy, she said, daily life centered on walkable historic downtowns, lingering coffees with friends and aperitivo after work, all set against a backdrop of buildings that carry generations of memory. In Maricopa, the spacing, silence and car-oriented lifestyle felt isolating at first. “It feels very lonely and individualistic kind of culture,” she told InMaricopa , contrasting it with the constant social rhythm she knew in Italy. Still, Maricopa eventually began to win her over. She made friends quickly. She continued building a career in education. She had already worked in higher education after arriving in the U.S., including at Central Texas College and the University of Phoenix. Eventually she moved into K-12, wanting to better understand the academic gaps she had seen in students before they reached college. Now in her fifth year as a school counselor, Fabbri works for the Maricopa Unified School District. Along the way, she completed a master’s degree in psychology, earned school counseling certification through the Arizona Department of Education and finished a doctorate in educational leadership in December. Her dissertation focused on school counseling. She said one turning point in her relationship with Maricopa came in March, when her parents and brother visited from Italy. Her brother’s reaction stuck with her. He told her he was happy to see her living here and thought Arizona suited her better than Texas had. He was struck by how many remarkable places were within a relatively short drive and by the state’s dramatically different landscapes. That comment helped crystallize something for Fabbri: The same openness and severity that
HEN ERIKA FABBRI FIRST DROVE into Maricopa in 2019, she cried. After years in central Texas, the stretch down State Route 347
felt stark, lonely and unfamiliar. The woman from near Vicenza, Italy, who had grown up surrounded by centuries-old architecture, café culture and dense social life, looked out at the desert and wondered what kind of place she had just moved to. “Where is he taking me now?” she recalled thinking as she arrived with her son. Today, nearly seven years later, Fabbri is the latest Maricopa resident to explain this city to an international audience. An Italian newspaper recently featured her in a story about people from Vicenza who now live elsewhere in the world. Fabbri, 42, said she reached out in part for a deeply personal reason. Her 93-year-old grandfather had surgery the day of the interview, and she wanted her family back home to be able to picture the place where she has built her life. So, she described Maricopa the way she has come to know it: as a city of dust storms, extreme heat, wide skies, desert wildlife, Mexican cultural influence and fast growth, with John Wayne Parkway cutting through a landscape that still feels larger than the city around it. The article that ran in Italy focused mostly on Maricopa itself, not just Fabbri’s biography. She told the paper about the desert’s “raw” beauty, Harrah’s Ak-Chin Casino, local events, the area’s Native and Mexican influences, the summer haboobs and even the muscle car group she and her husband launched during the pandemic to connect enthusiasts and support local businesses. But when InMaricopa caught up with her at her Cobblestone Farms home one day after that story was published, she filled in more of the personal story behind it. Fabbri moved to the U.S. in 2014 after meeting her husband, an American serviceman stationed in her hometown. Their love story started, improbably enough, over a dance battle. She was a dance teacher. He was a breakdancer from Houston.
To read an English translation of Claudia Milani Vicenzi’s article, titled Maricopa,
Infinite Spaces Where Sky and Earth Meet , scan the QR code:
InMaricopa.com | May 2026
May 2026 | InMaricopa.com
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