In All-Italian Matchup, Experience Wins Out, Then Rain Does Kena Betancur/Reuters 10 Roberta Vinci, above, defeated Camila Giorgi, 6-2, 6-2. In the quarter of the United States Open women's draw so overloaded with Italians it should have been officially named Little Italy, intra-country clashes have come fast and furious. For a time, before the rain started early Monday afternoon, two of them were barreling toward a quarterfinal matchup. 10 Roberta Vinci, the highest-ranked of the Italian women left in the draw, managed to speed ahead into the quarterfinals with a dominating 6-4, 6-2 victory over Camila Giorgi, who had given the Italian quarter a young, fashionable upstart. Their match on the Grandstand court finished only minutes before the skies opened and soaked the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center with the weather it finds all too familiar. "Of course I am very happy," Vinci said, proclaiming herself lucky to have beaten the turn in weather. I knew it was a tough match. She played good. She plays always strong, flat. I knew I had to change a lot of my focus. Next door, at Louis Armstrong Stadium, Flavia Pennetta appeared poised to join Vinci in an all-Italian quarterfinal, routing No. 21 Simona Halep of Romania, 6-2, in the first set and going up a break in the second, but Halep staged a comeback. In fact, she was serving for the second set at 5-4 and 40-30 when the rain began. That left half of the Italian equation open, and the other one was a foregone conclusion. The Vinci-Giorgi matchup was stylistically fascinating, and not just because Giorgi's mother designs her tennis outfits. Giorgi, 21, is the youngest and smallest of the Italian women in the draw, but with a powerful game that belies her size (5-foot-6 and 119 pounds) and her ranking (136). She had powered her way into this round with a three-set upset of No. 6 Caroline Wozniacki, pounding the ball so hard, it left everyone wondering where that power comes from. It also made her the crowd favorite during this match, her splash onto the scene embraced by the non-Italian portion of the crowd. Vinci, 30, knew not to be offended, even if she has been the steady stalwart of her country's tennis scene. "It is normal," Vinci said. Camila is young player. Of course the public wants that Camila goes to the quarterfinal or semifinal. When I was on the court, I was thinking about my game, not the public, not the crowd. Vinci, 30, is not only a solid veteran, but she had plenty of advance scouting on Giorgi, so nothing took her by surprise. That combination of knowledge and experience paid off in helping her weather Giorgi's early run, when she came out pounding the ball with the same ferocity as she had against Wozniacki and raced to a 4-1 lead in the first set. That go-for-broke strategy eventually came undone - she would end up with 35 unforced errors to 20 winners - as Vinci weathered her start and won the final five games of the set. Vinci's solid play, with only 9 unforced errors and 12 winners, overcame the free-swinging style of Giorgi. Vinci is now headed to her second straight Open quarterfinal, having played an all-Italian one, last year, when she lost to her doubles partner Sara Errani. This year, Errani was bounced in the second round by Pennetta, well underplaying her No. 4 seeding in a match in which she admitted crumpling under the pressure of being such a high seed. But Italian women's tennis is on such an upswing, that did not even qualify as a major crisis. There were six Italian women in the draw of 64 - five of them clumped together to form the Little Italy quarter - and three got to the round of 16. The clumping so far has produced three all-Italian matches. The women had been luckier to spread out their success in the other majors this year: they had not played each other a single time in either the Australian Open, French Open or Wimbledon. The other early women's match interrupted by rain was on Ashe Stadium, which was stopped with Daniela Hantuchova of Slovakia leading the American Alison Riske, 6-3, 4-4.