 His administration engaged new groups that had been kept out of the political system, gave New York its modern infrastructure, and raised expectations to new levels of urban possibility.La Guardia was born in Greenwich Village in New York City.His father, Achille La Guardia, was a Catholic from Cerignola, Italy, and his mother, Irene Luzzatto Coen, was a Jewish woman from Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his maternal grandmother Fiorina (Luzzatto) Coen was a Luzzatto, a member of the prestigious Sephardic Italian-Jewish family of scholars, kabbalists, and poets and had among her ancestors the famous rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto.