Last month, about 1 million turned out in New York’s Little Italy enclave for the food, entertainment, parades and celebratory Mass that caps the Feast of San Gennaro, one of the city’s largest street festivals. Begun in 1996, the 10-day annual event fêtes Januarius, patron saint of Naples, blood banks and volcanic eruptions “” and its defining events include a candlelit procession from Mulberry Street’s Most Precious Blood Church, a statue of Januarius in tow.
Rarely does a city see an event that so galvanizes a community.
And rarely has Marco Li Mandri seen anything so appalling.
Li Mandri, president of San Diego’s Little Italy Association, rather looks forward to the Precious Festa, his organization’s nod to Italian-American culture. It’s set for Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 7 and 8, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. along India Street between Ash and Grape streets and will feature Italian cuisine and arts and crafts (no vendors on Saturday) and a motor sports show and three stages of music and acclaimed singer/actor Eddie Mekka and a street painting event and all the things that define a neighborhood festival.
But for Li Mandri, the real event takes place beneath the surface. Precious Festa, he said, “celebrates the tremendous contributions Italians have made to this county” “” and he added that those gifts far transcend the significance behind the festival’s plans for chalk drawings and stickball tournaments.
“We sat around for about 11 years deciding where [the festival] was going,” Li Mandri said. “We tried to look at our event as a homecoming, something more than somebody coming and eating some food and going home.”
Italy, Li Mandri explained, enjoys a historical bond with open waters, hence the festival theme, “Celebrating the Legacy of the Sea.” But in Li Mandri’s hands, the story becomes a deeply personal tribute to the neighborhood’s working-class tradition and to the tuna, albacore and sardine fishermen who bolstered the neighborhood’s economy through the 1970s.
Soon after, Little Italy found itself in a fight for its identity amid the decline of the West Coast fishing industry and the I-5 construction that leveled a third of the neighborhood:
“San Diego wrote us off,” Li Mandri explained, prompting business leaders to take charge of their fates and the neighborhood’s destiny. Residential development has rebounded significantly. Since 1998, some 1,300 condos have been constructed in Little Italy, with about 1,000 more under construction. The neighborhood has also planned new public art displays.
Still, Li Mandri said, the public mind harbors a very different impression of Italian-American life.
“Right now,” Li Mandri said, “about the only thing that defines Italian-Americans is [HBO’s] ‘The Sopranos.’ America thinks of ties to organized crime when it thinks of Italy.” The authentic Italy, he said, looms behind figures like Amerigo Vespucci, the cartographer from whom this continent takes its name; Guglielmo Marconi, the wireless long-distance communications pioneer; and Christopher Columbus, whose reputation far precedes the mention of his name.
And New York’s Feast of San Gennaro?
“I was there,” Li Mandri said. “This is a genuine, major Italian religious festival. It was astonishing to find so much porno nearby, so close to Mulberry Street. It’s unconscionable. We find it absolutely disgusting.”
Several cities throughout the country hold similar San Gennaro events “” and it’s a cinch that their Italian communities don’t compare with the one in immigrant-minded New York. But by several accounts, San Diego’s Little Italy (minus the outside influences to which Li Mandri so strenuously objects) is coming into its own. Precious Festa, he said, is thus a critical tribute to Little Italy, to San Diego’s past and to the free-enterprise spirit that colors the Italian-American experience.
Precious Festa is co-presented by Precious Cheese, a Buffalo-based producer of Italian and snack cheeses. A schedule and more information about Precious Festa can be obtained at www.littleitalysd.com.