For five weeks, I?ve been having a torrid love affair with Little Italy. Following Italian lessons at the Rev. Oreste Pandola Adult Learning Center, the tiny enclave has seduced me into lingering for hours, luring my Italian blood into its romantic clutches.
Yet it is not the delectable restaurants or pastry shops that dangle temptation (though those alone are seductive). It is the allure of the heritage, the friendly born-in-the-neighborhood Italians and their stories buried beneath the crooked sidewalks.
Saturday?s dreamy rendezvous satiated me for six hours. I had no willpower to resist Little Italy?s sweet charm.
Mention “Molino,” and the generations before me easily recognize my family name. “Aunt Angie,” born here, and “Uncle John” were an intricate piece of the neighborhood puzzle for more than 60 years.
My brother and his son bought and renovated their Civil War-era house on South Eden Street. That spiral-staircased dwelling with its outside “tunnel” leading to a miniature backyard holds sweet memories, like the dolci served to us as children.
Real estate has been passed down from Italian parents to Americanized offspring, who commonly renovate and rent. The gridded Baltimore City neighborhood is a blend of folks, unlike when it was inhabited by names ending only in vowels.
Uncle John studied Italian because he wasn?t fluent in la bella lingua. Surprisingly, others of the second generation do not speak it either. Their parents and grandparents craved the Americano tongue, thus failing to teach Italian in its entirety.
Piccola Italia embraced Theresa Ferraro in its green, white and red arms from age 5 to 72, “a lifetime,” the 80-year-old student said. Does she miss it since moving to senior housing in Fells Point? “How can I miss it when I?m here all the time?”
Indeed she is. Ferraro shuffles around town each week, in and out of the school, past her former house a block over, or parks herself at an outdoor table, simply watching, probably remembering.
Seems she can?t break off her affair with Little Italy either.
Leaning against a brick column near the bocce court, Pete Ranieri and Tom LaCosta watch their friend Joe Scalia teach the game. The long, dusty, open-air court is wedged between a line of row homes and the nearby Order Sons of Italy lodge with two faded flags pinned to the wall; one flaps the Sicilian three-legged trinacria.
Ranieri, 74, reminisces about shooting marbles with “Nicky,” the son of then-Mayor Thomas D?Alesandro Jr.
“A great place to grow up,” he said, pointing to the back of his childhood home, now a restaurant.
Lifetimer Gene Schiavo dared not declare a favorite eatery, he said, because “they?re all my friends.” The tall and tanned retired hairdresser might be spotted during the neighborhood?s summer festivals hand-cranking a 102-year-old hurdy-gurdy, the organ that belonged to his grandfather from Genoa, Italy, though he never liked monkeys.
Schiavo stores the precious antique in the garage instead of his 18-foot-wide, 100-foot-long “shotgun” house, said the congenial 74-year-old, because it needs moisture.
He feels melancholy watching the older Italians die off.
“I saw many, many changes,” he said. “We had everything here. I miss the old people.”
Two durable fixtures are Dominic “Fuzzy” Leonardi and John Pente, both as sharp as the tacks once made at The Holland Manufacturing Co. on Little Italy?s fringe (now a well-hidden bar-bistro-bowling alley).
Pente, 98, still drives. Outside his corner home (its top floor used for movie projector placement during film fests), his weathered car sits in front of “Gina?s Place” ? two words etched in the sidewalk cement to designate his cockapoo?s private restroom, a dirt square surrounding a scrawny tree.
“We hang out,” said Fuzzy, 82, sitting on one of the half-dozen plastic chairs lined up against his friend?s house. “He calls us teenagers.”
The two gents wobbled off down the block toward 5:30 Mass at St. Leo?s, passing Isabella?s. Leonardi said to it with a nod, “Tell them Fuzzy said to treat you good.”
Italian Baltimorean Suzanne “Susanna” Molino Singleton freelances for The Baltimore Examiner and is a staff writer for The Catholic Review. Her four grandparents emigrated from Italy. E-mail [email protected].
