In terms of research on Italian records and supporting each other and especially those new to researching their Italian heritage - we will need to assemble some informative documents and advice.
But as a starting point - as with any immigrant ancestor - we want to figure out as much from what we can access where they arrived that may point us to the place they were from. If we know the town of origin we are in much better shape to explore next steps. Sometimes this is already known as a matter of family history and shared stories, other times we find it through naturalization records, arrival / immigration records. (Or more lucky yet: passports and actual vital records documents in the family treasury!)
Census documents tend to report at the country level, which is more helpful in a German context when let's say Bavaria and Baden were separate "countries" rather than separate states of Germany. For Italy it doesn't help so much.
FamilySearch.org also works in cooperation with the Italian govt. in an effort to digitize many records from regional and commune archives. Not all localities are covered yet. In my case Villa Santa Lucia degli Abruzzi is there, but several months ago Ferruzzano wasnt. (Havent checked back lately). In this case you would need to develop some familiarity not only with Italian terms likely to be found on vital records, but also the Italian formal handwriting of the period. FamilySearch has some resources on that. To reiterate, you don't need to speak Italian fluently - you just need to understand some key words for basic research. Some records and some details of course may require translation to understand what is going on - but you will be surprised how far you can get!
Right now if you need translation help and you have some documents, you might post a request on the G2G here, or I can recommend some other places or perhaps take a look myself. My Italian is pretty decent for genealogical purposes.
