After a nine-hour flight home from Italy, a family from Lake Hauto had no idea they would spend even longer than that on Interstate 78 Wednesday night, thanks to winter storm Quinn.

Joe Pilla and his family landed at JFK Airport around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, after the trip of a lifetime. It would take them another 14 hours to get from New York back to their home.

“We came to a halt in the express lane, 10 minutes, 20 minutes passed. We figured, ‘OK, maybe we’ll be here an hour,’ ” Pilla recalled after he was back home Thursday morning. “We literally didn’t leave that spot until 3:30 in the morning.”

The trip was unforgettable — they visited Joe’s daughter, a study abroad student from Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and took his mother to the family’s ancestral home in a small town called Circello.

But it was also marked by some weird weather. While it’s normally a mild 60 degrees in Rome this type of year, last week the city had snowstorms, which happens once every few years.

Raging storm

Joe was tracking the storm on the way home, but it looked like it would strike here at home more than in the New York area. They arrived an hour early.

As their flight descended through the clouds, they found the storm was raging around them — visibility was low, and the turbulence was high.

“Landing in the snowstorm was unbelievable — you come down through the storm you think, this thing could flip the plane upside down,” he said.

They landed, and everyone clapped.

With the airport virtually empty due to delayed and canceled flights, getting to their shuttle and heading out was no problem.

While the roads were clear, conditions started to deteriorate quickly.

With traffic stacking up, they ended up on the express lane of Interstate 78 near Springfield Township.

Snow started sticking to the roads. Then things came to a dead stop.

Ten minutes passed, then 20.

Eventually, some drivers tried to cross the grass median to the nonexpress lanes which were still moving, and promptly got stuck. Ahead of them, jackknifed tractor-trailers blocked the road.

There was no indication of whether the traffic would clear up in another 10 minutes, or another 10 hours.

“I was thinking, OK, 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock — I thought at least I’d get home by midnight,” Pilla said.

Hours later

They downloaded a police scanner app for their phone. After a few hours they called 911, concerned not only for themselves, but if there were elderly people who were also stuck on the road. They apologized to the operator who scolded them for traveling — after all, this wasn’t part of their plans when they booked the trip months before.

Still, they had no idea when traffic would get moving. So Pilla stayed up the whole time, with the exception of a couple cat naps.

“Every 30 minutes I was getting out. I could see about two football fields and it was just red (taillights),” Pilla said.

Their driver had brought bottled water and some crackers. It wasn’t a pizza or a cheese­steak, but they tasted pretty good at the time.

As midnight passed, it was hard to tell whether the red lights ahead of them were moving or not.

Eventually they learned that a truck had jackknifed ahead of them, dropping diesel fuel on the roadway. The cleanup was hampered by the weather.

Around 3:30 a.m., they got moving again. But the going was still slow. Some truckers had gone to sleep in their cabs for the night. Some drivers had just abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the interstate.

It was 6 a.m. by the time Pilla pulled into his driveway. And a few hours later, he was on his way to work, still running on adrenaline from the night before, or the great trip.

In the future, he said he won’t travel in a storm without some bottled water, and a small snow shovel in the car.

But for as harrowing as the return trip was, he wouldn’t trade the trip for anything.

“An amazing trip of a lifetime,” he said. “From the very start to the extreme end.”