Parodi Cigars Exported to Italy

The Italian-style dry-cured cigars made by the Avanti cigar company in the United States (which my Italian grandfather used to smoke and we called "guinea stinkers") are finally going to be available in Italy...

Fulfilling a lifelong goal of its immigrant forebears, the family that owns Avanti Cigar Co. has established its famous Parodi cigars in Italy.

Not only has the Scranton company's brand found a market on the peninsula, but sales are growing. Next year the company expects to have more products in an expanding number of Italian tobacco shops.

"This has always been a dream of my family, to have their product in their homeland," said Dominic Keating, president of Avanti Cigar. "But in the wake of World War II and then trade barriers, it never seemed like a possibility."

It took the creation of the European Union, and then a complex agreement with a Swiss cigar company with a factory in Germany, to fulfill the dream of Avanti's founders, Anthony and Frank Suraci. The brothers left a poor village in Calabria in 1903 and 1906 and built the largest Italian-style cigar maker in the U.S.