August in Pittsburgh means it’s time for Little Italy Days, the annual four-day Bloomfield celebration spotlighting on the city’s rich Italian heritage. Bloomfield, though, was just one of several Little Italys that sprouted in Pittsburgh in the early years of the 20th century.
Italians comprised one of Pittsburgh’s largest immigrant groups. Along with craft skills, foodways, and rich religious festivals, they also brought traditional Italian approaches to community building. Immigrants clustered together with others who spoke their language and shared their village cultures.
Pittsburgh’s Little Italys didn’t appear overnight. Some grew from inauspicious family enclaves, and took years to coalesce into more than city neighborhoods with lots of Italians living there.
The people are key, says Heinz History Center Italian American program director Melissa Marinaro. “But I also think that Little Italys have an infrastructure,” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “They have churches. They have small businesses. They have mutual beneficial societies. I see those three things as being core to this idea of a Little Italy because they’re replicating their infrastructure from back home.”
Little Italy Days brings throngs of festivalgoers to Bloomfield, and has become a commercialized, often polarizing event. Residents and business owners wring their hands over parking, trash, and other nuisances. Some longtime residents even leave the city each year to avoid it.
Regardless of locals’ ambivalent opinions, the August festival tips its hat to the Italian immigrants and their children who made tremendous contributions to the city’s history, from restaurateur Frank Bongiovanni (father of Pittsburgh’s cabaret culture) to the late Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri. They founded business and political dynasties and criminal empires.
It all began in small enclaves called borgatas. Borgata is an Italian word for a hamlet or small village. Like pasta and pizza, the borgata is an import Italian Americans have adapted to their new home. It’s still used to denote a community, though it also became the word used to describe Mafia families.
Pittsburgh’s first borgatas sprouted in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, when the city’s Italian population exploded, from 1,889 people in 1890 to more than 14,000 in 1910, according to Pittsburgh Rising, a 2024 book by historians Rob Ruck and Edward K. Muller. The earliest Italian immigrants settled downtown and in the Lower Hill District before expanding eastward.
“Many came with skills that gave them options beyond factory work and unskilled labor,” Ruck and Muller wrote. Earlier historians described these enclaves or borgatas as “colonies.”
“Before we think about the history of Italians on the East End, the history of Italians in the neighborhood of Bloomfield, really Downtown is where we see those kernels begin,” Marinaro says.
Though Italians settled throughout southwestern Pennsylvania in coal towns and in places such as Monongahela and New Castle, these communities never developed distinct Little Italys like in Pittsburgh.
“In some of those cases, you don’t see that tight-knit urban center the way you would see here in Pittsburgh,” says Marinaro. “We’re going to have an Italian Catholic church that’s going to serve that audience. We are going to see small businesses. We are going to see clubs, and so I think that, on scale, they’re smaller.”
Homes for stonemasons, landscapers, and bootleggers
But Pittsburgh’s East End and Penn Hills were special cases. Italian immigrants who settled there in large numbers included stonemasons who built Pittsburgh’s waterworks and who made many of the ornate headstones found in Pittsburgh’s cemeteries. They also included gardeners, cooks, tailors, and lamplighters — people helped feed the city and maintain the city’s infrastructure.
Raphael and Rosa Tito were among the city’s earliest Italian immigrants. They arrived in 1888 from Southern Italy and first rented homes in Bloomfield. Raphael worked as a lamplighter, and in 1896, he began buying property on Gazzam Hill in West Oakland. As their family grew, Raphael and Rosa’s children and their spouses moved into homes that Raphael had bought or built.
Raphael and Rosa’s oldest son, Joe, grew up on Gazzam Hill. Joe Tito lived there when he went into the bootlegging business and launched one of the most colorful and impactful criminal careers in Pittsburgh history. As Prohibition wound down in the early 1930s, Joe and his brothers bought the Latrobe Brewing Company. After Prohibition, they introduced the brewery’s best-known brand: Rolling Rock.
Like many of its counterparts, the Tito enclave never grew into a Little Italy. Several homes from it still survive; in the wintertime, a few of the hillside houses are visible from across the Monongahela River.
Francesco “Frank” Bongiovanni was another early immigrant. He settled downtown in 1904 after coming to Pittsburgh from northern Italy by way of London and New York. Bongiovanni went to work in several 6th Avenue Italian restaurants before opening his own. In 1913, he bought the popular Nixon Café inside the Nixon Theater building on 6th Avenue.
Bongiovanni knew his way around Italian cuisine and entertainment. After arriving in Pittsburgh in 1904, he first cooked for Fred Colelli in a restaurant downtown near Grant Street. Colelli, according to some sources, introduced spaghetti to Pittsburgh palates.
Bongiovanni knew his way around Italian cuisine and entertainment. After arriving in Pittsburgh in 1904, he first cooked for Fred Colelli in a restaurant downtown near Grant Street. Colelli, according to some sources, introduced spaghetti to Pittsburgh palates.”
“Bongiovanni, too, saw American dollars in spaghetti and opened a place of his own in Fifth Avenue,” wrote newspaper columnist Charles Danver in 1932. “He had an orchestra there and he himself began to sing for the customers. Thus he became known as the ‘father of the cabaret’ in Pittsburgh.”
Bongiovanni quickly made enough money to move from Pittsburgh’s first Little Italy. Instead of moving to another Little Italy, he bought a home in the Knoxville neighborhood, where he built a greenhouse. After Prohibition began in 1920, he added tunnels connecting the house to a garage and back alley.
“They said Italians lived there,” Mary Ann Stephens, who owns a home next to the former Bongiovanni house site, tells City Paper.“They made their liquor and their wine, and it was an underground cellar that went out the back way in the alley. There’s a tunnel in the back alley.”
A vacant lot is the only thing left of Bongiovanni’s home, greenhouse and bootlegging tunnel.
Besides spaghetti, cabaret entertainment, and bootlegging, Bongiovanni made his mark in Pittsburgh history as a suburban roadhouse owner. His most enduring contribution might have been launching Bongiovanni’s Floating Palace. For a little more than 20 years, Bongiovanni’s “pleasure scow” (later renamed the Show Boat after he lost it in bankruptcy in 1924) spawned sensational stories of gambling, illegal liquor consumption, illegal dancing — that was a thing in Pittsburgh — and political corruption before it sank in 1943 in the Monongahela River.
Bongiovanni didn’t have a large family, and he died relatively young at 51 in 1925. Though he didn’t build an enclave, Bongiovanni’s greenhouse connects him to Italian gardening traditions that spread throughout the city’s Little Italys.
“I always had a garden,” says Pirollo. “We love gardens. Yes, tomatoes, peppers, Swiss chard, green beans.”
Mary Pirollo’s family arrived in Pittsburgh in the first half of the 20th century. She was born in 1933 and was 19 when she came to Pittsburgh. Her family had been here for about several decades.
“My grandfather, my mom’s father, Pirollo tells CP, “He was well-to-do. He already had a house. He already had a business [as] a landscaper.”
Tending the garden, though, was more than a chore. It was tradition. “We used to can tomatoes and peppers, all that, and that’s kept in the cold cellar. Everything was kept in the cold cellar,” Pirollo remembers. “Every Italian home has a cold cellar.”
Chianti Street
Some of Pirollo’s family had lived on Chianti Street in East Liberty. It was a narrow hillside street that the city removed to create Negley Run Boulevard in the 1950s. Chianti Street got its name in 1909, when Pittsburgh City Council renamed more than 900 streets.
“River Avenue, East End, is peopled largely by Italians and it is to be known as Chianti Street, which is the name of a favorite wine among the Italians,” the Pittsburgh Press reported.
“When Italian immigrants first came to East Liberty, people of German and Scots-Irish descent owned the properties on the main thoroughfare and wouldn’t rent to the Italians,” Marinaro says. “So, they settled in an area that became known as Chianti Way.”
It wasn’t a name that the Italian immigrants picked, much like other derogatory names given to Black neighborhoods by white leaders. “The name was a demeaning reference to the immigrants, who made and drank their own wine and who lived in shacks,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote in a 1995 obituary of University of Pittsburgh Italian studies professor Joseph Greco. Greco wrote two volumes of poetry, in Italian, titled Chianti Way and Chianti Way II.
“The ghost of the indefatigable immigrant,” wrote Greco, “is keeping vigil over the ruins of recent history, over lost tears of the late tortured Chianti Way of East Liberty.”
To city leaders, “chianti” was a slur lobbed at recent immigrants. To the Italians, wine was an important part of daily life and the Catholic religion. Winemaking, like sauce made from homegrown tomatoes, was a communal activity.
Pittsburgh’s Italian immigrants bought their grapes in the Strip District. “In Italy, we grew them,” Pirollo explains. They’d crush the grapes the traditional way by stepping on them or they’d use a grinder.
Mary Pirollo moved to Larimer as a teenager in 1952. Her uncle, Dominic Parente, was a landscaper who owned his own contracting business. He also owned a grape grinder the family shared. “If one person had it, they would borrow it,” Pirollo says.
Bongiovanni and the Titos were not typical Pittsburgh Italian Americans. The majority of Pittsburgh’s Little Italy residents were working-class immigrants struggling to make it in a sometimes hostile and xenophobic city.
Parente helped to get Pirollo, her mother, and her brother and sister set up in a house on Hoeveler Street in East Liberty. “It kept us all together. The house was perfect, fixed,” she says. “We had everything.”
Pirollo’s extended family hailed from Spigno Saturnia, a village between Rome and Naples. In Pittsburgh, they bonded with other Spignese in church and in the social club they founded in 1927, the Spigno Saturnia Italo-American Society of Pittsburgh.
Many Italians who had lived in the Lower Hill District moved east and south, to Penn Hills and Brookline. Larimer and East Liberty, where many Black Hill District residents moved after urban renewal began, also hemorrhaged Italian residents. In the 1960s, their homes, stores, and gathering places suffered the same fate as the city’s urban renewal machine made its way eastward.
Len Zucco’s father was a Hill District numbers writer. The Zuccos moved to Brookline when he was two years old. “We moved because of the Civic Arena. We had to move,” he tells CP. “The Italians moved to Brookline, to Beechview. Brookline and Beechview, mainly.”
Marinaro agrees that many Italians displaced from the Hill District went south. “They went into Dormont, Mount Lebanon. Some of them went to Beechview, Brookline,” Marinaro says. “In my research, the pattern that I have seen is that they go in every direction.”
East seems to have been the most popular direction. A lot of Pirollo’s family ended up in Penn Hills. They all lived close together, just like they did in East Liberty, Larimer, and the Hill District. “There was a group like Little Italy here, all the Italians together. It was the same up there,” she says.
“Back in the 60’s, the City of Pittsburgh had an idea to do urban renewal,” Tony Stagno, a longtime leader of the Spigno-Saturnia club, tells CP. His uncle Frank owned Stagno’s Bakery. Its original location was behind Frank Stagno’s home.
The Spigno-Saturnia club originally occupied buildings near what’s now East Liberty Boulevard and Hamilton Avenue. “It’s gone. They took our original club, which was at the bottom of Omega Street.”
Frank Stagno’s bakery’s final location was on Auburn Street, a few blocks away from the club’s first site, before it closed.
“Complete devastation”
Like Stagno, many former East Liberty and Larimer residents describe their former neighborhood in ways that echo stories told by Pittsburgh’s Black residents displaced by urban renewal. In her 2023 book, Neighborhood Girl, author Linda Schifino wrote about the profound sense of loss that she felt after visiting her family’s old Larimer Avenue homesite. She hadn’t been there in at least 30 years.
“It was painful,” Schifino tells CP. “I would have been foolish to have expected it to look the same. I clearly knew it wouldn’t look the same, but I was not expecting complete devastation. Just everything gone. Just one empty space after another.”
Schifino grew up on Larimer Avenue. Her parents rented an apartment above a grocery store owned by another Italian family.
“My mom would go down to Mr. Corraza, downstairs who owned the grocery store, to pay the rent in cash every month,” Schifino says. “And she handed him the money, and he put it away. And he didn’t count it, and she didn’t ask for a receipt.”
Growing up, it seemed like everything she and her family needed was just a short walk away. “My school was there. My church was there. All my relatives were there, my cousins, my friends, my whole world was there,” Schifino says.
There are what Schifino calls glimmers of her old neighborhood that still shine through. Henry Grasso’s sausage store at 716 Larimer Ave. was still open when she wrote Neighborhood Girl, and the sign on the façade still thanks people in Italian — “Grazie Y Ciao!” — and in English, “Thank you for 90 years.” The store closed in 2022.
DeRosa’s funeral home on Paulson Avenue played a big part in Little Italy. “My mother and my aunts always dragged me to DeRosa’s funeral home. Not just for relatives, for neighbors,” Schifino says. She thinks she attended as many as 50 funerals there.
“You either went to Febbraro’s or DeRosa’s,” says Stagno. “Once they went out of business, that’s when the Italians started going to McCabe’s, or even out to Penn Hills to Gross’. But for the longest time, that’s where everybody was.”
The Paulson Avenue home and funeral parlor had been in the DeRosa family since 1912. DeRosa’s was founded by Michael DeRosa Jr. His father had been a powerful political leader and bootlegger. Michael DeRosa Jr. had been an alderman who resigned in the 1930s after convictions on corruption charges. In 1990, the Friendly Rivalry Often Generates Success (FROGS) club bought the property and moved its clubhouse there. Hints from the DeRosa years include awnings leading to the main entrance and a DeRosa family crest with the initials “M.D.” carved into it.
Clues to the past
To preserve some of the memories of erased neighborhoods, Tony Stagno and Chris Pirollo are developing a bus tour that will weave through East Liberty and Larimer. Its route includes the beloved bakery Stagno’s family owned, churches, homes, stores, and many vacant lots. It’s a race against time as many of the people who remember the old neighborhoods age and die.
“I want people to say, ‘That’s where I grew up,’” Stagno says.
“To me, the Italian neighborhood extends from East Liberty through Larimer Avenue, then on to Paulson Avenue, and to Lemington, and then up Lincoln Avenue to the city limits,” Pirollo tells CP while driving through Larimer. “Lincoln Avenue was a very mixed neighborhood of German, Irish, Polish, and Italian. But over the years, that entire corridor has seen deterioration and blight. The very house I grew up in and the very house that my grandmother, right behind us on Elrod Way … they’re destroyed. They don’t exist anymore and they’re overgrown with trees and bushes.”
White flight and opportunities to own larger homes with yards decimated Pittsburgh’s earliest Little Italys. “Part of why they’re moving north, they’re moving south, is because they’re going to areas where they can acquire property. Either a new home has been built. They can build a new home. So a lot of it is related to housing,” says Marinaro.
Many of the people who remember the neighborhoods moved away long ago. Mary Pirollo lives in a modest Stanton Heights ranch house she bought in 1970. Stagno and Chris Pirollo live in the suburbs.
Bloomfield is the sole survivor from a bygone era. Little Italy Days tries to keep Pittsburgh’s Italian heritage alive, though some say it misses much of the soul that defined the city’s Italian neighborhoods. “It’s sort of become a branding thing, right?,” says Marinaro. “We brand this place as Little Italy, and it’s really focused a lot on the commercial district.”
There’s a chance places like Chianti Street, DeRosa’s funeral home, and Stagno’s bakery will be forgotten. It’s up to people like the Pirollos, Stagnos, and Schifino to ensure that Pittsburgh’s Little Italys aren’t forgotten or remembered piecemeal as nostalgia.
Correction: This article has been updated to better reflect Colleli’s probable introduction of spaghetti to Pittsburgh.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2025.
