The Family That Lights the Sky
Open Since 1893 — Zambelli Fireworks
For America’s 250th birthday, the fireworks you’ll see come from a lineage almost nobody knows — one that started with a teenager, a black book of recipes, and a steel town in Pennsylvania.
Ask anyone where fireworks come from and they’ll say China. And they’d be half right. Gunpowder was born there in the 9th Century, and today most of the world’s shells are still manufactured in Hunan Province.
But the fireworks that burst over American harbors, ballparks, and county fairs — the tradition of the great American display, the choreography and the patriotic craft — didn’t come from China. It came from Italy. And this week, as the country turns 250, that’s worth thinking about for a moment.
In the late 1800s, a handful of Italian families stepped off boats at Ellis Island carrying something unusual: recipes for fire. They were heavily guarded little notebooks, passed father to son, and often locked away. The longtime director of the American Pyrotechnics Association once said it plainly: Italians dominate the American fireworks business, and it traces back to a few families who arrived in those years. The Gruccis of Long Island. The Rozzis of Ohio. The Vitales, who became Pyrotecnico. The Bartolottas of Wisconsin.
And a sixteen-year-old from a village near Naples named Antonio Zambelli.
A hat tipped to a seven-year-old statue
Family lore has it that as Antonio’s ship slid past the Statue of Liberty in 1893 — she was only seven years old herself, dedicated just a few years before — he took off his hat.
He didn’t arrive to a waiting empire. He arrived in a dusty, hard-working mill town. Antonio settled in New Castle, Pennsylvania, fifty miles north of Pittsburgh, and went to work the way most immigrants did: with his hands. By day, the steel mills. By night and on weekends, he made fireworks — by hand, one shell at a time — using the formulas in that little black book he’d carried from Italy. The recipes were written in Italian.
For decades, Zambelli worked for a rival — the Fazzoni Brothers, the first family to set up a fireworks operation in New Castle. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the Zambellis acquired that company, and not until 1960 that George Zambelli Sr. rebranded and incorporated it under the family name.
What it means to hold a family business
The thing that crossed the Atlantic in 1893 wasn’t a company. It was a craft. Antonio didn’t arrive in America with a storefront or a payroll. He arrived with a little black book of fireworks recipes, written in Italian.
Everything in that notebook represented the critical intellectual property, the ideas, the formulas, and the recipes for the celebrations we cherish in this country, from inaugurations to Independence Day.
And they never stopped practicing it. Antonio made fireworks by hand at night while the steel mill ran by day. His son Joe was building shells by the age of twelve. By the time the family finally bought the Fazzoni company outright in the 1940s, the Zambellis had already been making American fireworks for half a century — first as apprentices, then as craftsmen, then as owners.
We tend to picture a family business as a thing you inherit — a building, a name over a door, a set of keys handed down. But that’s not really what gets passed from one generation to the next. Buildings burn. Names change. Markets move on. What actually survives a hundred years is something you can’t put in a will: knowledge, held in the hands and the heads of the people who practice it.
That’s the truer inheritance. A father shows a son how to pack a shell so it breaks clean. How to read the wind off a river before a show. How to time a finale so the last burst lands in your chest a half-second after your eyes. None of that is written down in any way that would help a stranger. It only transfers one way — slowly, in person, across years of standing beside someone who already knows. The Zambelli black book held the recipes, but the recipes were never the whole secret. The secret was the family that knew what to do with them.
This is why the deepest family businesses are so hard to copy and so hard to kill. A competitor can buy the same equipment and hire the same suppliers, but they cannot buy the decades a family has spent making mistakes and remembering them. Antonio taught his sons. His sons taught theirs. Joe was shaping shells by the age of twelve, not in a classroom but at his father’s elbow. Every generation added something — electronic firing, choreography to music, shells that draw a flag in the sky — and every generation carried forward everything the last one had learned. The company grew, but the thread never broke.
That thread is the business, the unbroken chain of family folks who know and understand the craft because someone who loved them took the time to teach it.
When we say the Zambellis have been open for 133 years, that’s what we mean. Four generations of the same family, each one handed the fire and trusted to carry it a little further before passing it on.
The First Family of Fireworks
When George Sr. got hold of it, everything changed.
Where his father made fireworks, George Sr. sold them — and reinvented what a show could be. He turned displays into designed, music-choreographed spectacles, a “designer brand” of fireworks, as his son later put it. He worked seventeen-hour days, subscribed to newspapers from all over the country, and cold-called every town, team, and corporation that might want a sky lit up.
It worked. In 1961, Zambelli provided the pyrotechnics for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration — and every president since has watched a Zambelli show. Inaugurations, White House lawns, state dinners. That unbroken presidential streak is why the family calls itself The First Family of Fireworks.
The résumé from there reads like a highlight reel of the American century. They lit up Hyde Park the night before Charles and Diana’s wedding. They welcomed home the Iranian hostages and the troops of Desert Storm. They held a Guinness record for the highest-altitude fireworks, shot from the top of the U.S. Steel Tower. And in 1986, they entertained at the 100th birthday of the Statue of Liberty — the very same statue a teenage Antonio had tipped his hat to ninety-three years earlier. The hat comes back around.
The town noticed. New Castle — home to Zambelli and its crosstown peer Pyrotecnico — became so synonymous with the craft that it holds a U.S.-trademarked title: The Fireworks Capital of America.
The gonzo send-off
Not every Zambelli show is for a president or a nation. In 2005, the family took on one of their most interesting jobs.
When the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson died earlier that year, he left behind a very specific final wish: he wanted to be fired out of a cannon. Not metaphorically. His widow, Anita, flew his ashes to Pennsylvania and hand-delivered them to Zambelli, where they were blended into the fireworks by hand, and the finished shells were driven back to Colorado in an armored car.
On August 20, in front of a crowd that included Johnny Depp — who reportedly covered the roughly $3 million bill — along with Jack Nicholson, Bill Murray, and Sean Penn, Thompson’s ashes were loaded into a launcher atop a tower he’d designed for exactly this purpose: more than 150 feet tall, shaped like a giant two-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button. Then, to Bob Dylan and a blaze of red, white, blue, and green, thirty-four shells carried what was left of him hundreds of feet up into the Rocky Mountain sky.
It’s the whole Zambelli story in miniature. A family that has spent more than a century turning the biggest moments in American life into light — inaugurations, homecomings, a nation’s birthday — asked to do the same for one wild, singular American who wanted to leave the only way that suited him.
The moat is time
Every hundred-year company survives a moment that should have killed it. For the whole American fireworks industry, that moment was China.
By the late twentieth century, manufacturing had moved overseas. It became cheaper and safer to make shells abroad than in a Pennsylvania hillside dotted with concrete bunkers. Companies that had made their own product for a century suddenly couldn’t compete on manufacturing at all. New Castle, once home to a dozen fireworks makers, thinned out.
The families that survived did it by changing what business they were in. Zambelli stopped competing on making fireworks and started competing on something no factory in Hunan could ship: artistry, choreography, logistics, and trust. Designing a show that takes an hour of work for every minute in the sky. Firing forty thousand effects from seventeen positions around a single city, as they did for Pittsburgh’s 250th.
That’s the lesson, and it’s one you’ll see again and again in these stories: the deepest moat isn’t a product. It’s the accumulated craft that time makes impossible to copy.
They protected what was sacred: Family, reputation, and standard.
Cataracts by day, fireworks by night
The man who leads Zambelli today, George Zambelli Jr., is Antonio’s grandson. He is also an ophthalmologist. Cataracts by day, fireworks by night. His two sons — the fourth generation — work the business with him now.
And his father, George Sr., left him a habit worth stealing. During every single display, George Sr. stood with his back to the fireworks. He didn’t watch the sky. He watched the faces of the crowd — waiting for the exact instant when a few thousand people forgot everything else and just looked up.
That’s the whole thing, really. Not the chemistry. The moment.
This weekend
America turns 250 this week, and the Zambellis are honoring it the only way they know how, with around 600 shows across 40 states, super-sized for the occasion — including shells that assemble into an American flag in the air.
So tonight and tomorrow, when your town’s sky lights up to a chorus of ‘oh and ah’, look up and remember this: somewhere out there is a family that has been doing exactly this for more than 130 years. A family that started with a teenager, a mill job, and a notebook full of fire.
You’ve seen their work your whole life.
You just never knew their name.
The Zambellis: Open Since 1893
Open Since profiles the American family businesses that have quietly operated for a century or more — the companies you know by their product and have never known by name. New episodes + articles coming soon.
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