By Gina McGalliard
FESTA! merges with Sicilian Festival
At this year’s 21st annual FESTA!, San Diegans will enjoy an even bigger and better celebration of Italian heritage and culture now that FESTA! has joined forces with the San Diego Sicilian Festival to combine into one event, Sunday, Oct. 11 on the streets of Little Italy.
“[The FESTA!] is two things,” said Marco LiMandri, current chief executive administrator of the Little Italy Association (LIA). “One is a homecoming. Most Italian Americans in San Diego County were either born, or grew up, were married or they buried their parents through Our Lady of the Rosary Church, which is the foundation of Little Italy.
“Everybody has this tie to Little Italy,” he continued. “So it’s a homecoming and every year we welcome everybody back to see the neighborhood. The second thing is — and I’m a native San Diegan — what we’ve demonstrated in Little Italy over the last 20 years is what you can do with a Downtown neighborhood that has great historic ethnic roots but is also contemporary.”
LiMandri helped start FESTA! in 1994 when the local business association was first formed. Now organizers and volunteers of the Sicilian Festival — which has also been around for 21 years — will be collaborating with LiMandri and the LIA to “preserve the cultural elements and flavor” of the Sicilian Festival while putting on an event that pays homage to the entire region.
The celebration, one of the largest Italian festivals in the country, covers 15 city blocks and typically attracts 120,000 attendees, some whom travel from out of town. Activities include a stickball tournament, a grape stomp, and a spaghetti-eating contest. Live Italian music will be performed on three stages, foodies can check out cooking demonstrations at the Mercato Stage, and little ones can enjoy themselves at the Kid’s Fun Zone with balloon art and face painting.
In addition to a stickball exhibition, a bocce ball tournament will also be held, and participants have an opportunity to win up to $600.
In addition, on the Friday prior to the event, there will be a special movie night “Serata al Cinema” in at the open-air theater of Amici Park, featuring the film “5 Hour Friends,” at 8 p.m. Featuring Tom Sizemore, “5 Hour Friends” was actually filmed in the Little Italy neighborhood and elsewhere in San Diego. Soap opera fans will probably recognize Fallbrook resident and actress Kimberlin Brown, widely known for playing the wicked Sheila Carter on “The Young and the Restless” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”
Car aficionados will want to check out the Italian Motorsports Show — which was not present at last year’s festival — featuring classic Italian cars such as Ferraris, Lamborghinis and even some Italian motorcycles.
And of course the popular 8-foot-by-8-foot Italian chalk art pieces, known as Gesso Italiano, will be back, taking up three blocks of W. Beech Street, between India and Union streets.
“The art of street painting actually originated in Italy probably hundreds of years ago,” said Sandi Cottrell of Little Italy Events, one of the FESTA! organizers. Cottrell is also managing director of another popular and successful annual Little Italy event, Mission Federal’s ARTWalk.
“It’s such an amazing depiction of whatever our theme is,” she said. “This year, we are doing a tribute to Balboa Park in honor of the centennial.”
History buffs won’t want to miss the film on the history of the neighborhood’s ties to the tuna fishing industry, which will be shown throughout the day at the newly expanded cultural pavilion at the corner of Fir and India streets.
“People who aren’t that familiar with Little Italy are not aware that the fishing industry was how Little Italy came to be,” Cottrell said. “Immigrants, primarily from Sicily, came over and when the tuna fishing industry was such a big component of San Diego commerce back in the ’50s and ’60s, it was all the Italians settled in Little Italy that were running it.”
LiMandri said that in addition to being a “homecoming of sorts,” the annual celebration of Italian culture is also “a snapshot of the tremendous growth of this great historic ethnic neighborhood” that belongs to Downtown San Diego.
“Our FESTA!, which stresses the positive contributions of Italian Americans to American culture and to the city of San Diego’s history, has grown into the largest single day Italian American festival in the country today,” LiMandri said. “The FESTA! is an important cultural event in San Diego, but most importantly, it is fun and is filled with great people, great food and great art and entertainment.”
Little Italy’s 21st annual FESTA! will be held Sunday, Oct. 11, from 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. For more information, visit littleitalysd.com. Volunteers are welcome.
—Gina McGalliard is a local freelance writer. You can contact her at [email protected] or follow her blog, ginamcgalliard.com/mcgalliardmatters.
