For decades an Italian-American town in Pennsylvania had far less heart disease than the near-identical town next door despite smoking, drinking and eating much the same, and the only thing that explained the gap was how closely its people lived
The town is Roseto, in eastern Pennsylvania, settled at the end of the nineteenth century by immigrants from a single village in southern Italy. By the 1950s it sat almost on top of Bangor, the next town over, close enough that the two shared the same water, the same air, the sam…