At this year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201c[The FESTA!] is two things,\u201d said Marco LiMandri, current chief executive administrator of the Little Italy Association (LIA). \u201cOne 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.<\/p>\n \u201cEverybody has this tie to Little Italy,\u201d he continued. \u201cSo it\u2019s a homecoming and every year we welcome everybody back to see the neighborhood. The second thing is \u2014 and I\u2019m a native San Diegan \u2014 what we\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n LiMandri helped start FESTA! in 1994 when the local business association was first formed. Now organizers and volunteers of the Sicilian Festival \u2014 which has also been around for 21 years \u2014 will be collaborating with LiMandri and the LIA to \u201cpreserve the cultural elements and flavor\u201d of the Sicilian Festival while putting on an event that pays homage to the entire region.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Fun Zone with balloon art and face painting.<\/p>\n In addition to a stickball exhibition, a bocce ball tournament will also be held, and participants have an opportunity to win up to $600.<\/p>\n In addition, on the Friday prior to the event, there will be a special movie night \u201cSerata al Cinema\u201d in at the open-air theater of Amici Park, featuring the film \u201c5 Hour Friends,\u201d at 8 p.m. Featuring Tom Sizemore, \u201c5 Hour Friends\u201d 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 \u201cThe Young and the Restless\u201d\u00a0and \u201cThe Bold and the Beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n Car aficionados will want to check out the Italian Motorsports Show \u2014 which was not present at last year\u2019s festival \u2014 featuring classic Italian cars such as Ferraris, Lamborghinis and even some Italian motorcycles.<\/p>\n And of course the popular 8-foot-by-8-foot Italian chalk art pieces, known as\u00a0Gesso Italiano, will be back, taking up three blocks of W. Beech Street, between India and Union streets.<\/p>\n \u201cThe art of street painting actually originated in Italy probably hundreds of years ago,\u201d said Sandi Cottrell of\u00a0Little Italy Events,\u00a0one of the FESTA! organizers. Cottrell is also managing director of another popular and successful annual Little Italy event, Mission Federal\u2019s ARTWalk.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s such an amazing depiction of whatever our theme is,\u201d she said. \u201cThis year, we are doing a tribute to Balboa Park in honor of the centennial.\u201d<\/p>\n History buffs won\u2019t want to miss the film on the history of the neighborhood\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople who aren\u2019t that familiar with Little Italy are not aware that the fishing industry was how Little Italy came to be,\u201d Cottrell said. \u201cImmigrants, primarily from Sicily, came over and when the tuna fishing industry was such a big component of San Diego commerce back in the \u201950s and \u201960s, it was all the Italians settled in Little Italy that were running it.\u201d<\/p>\n LiMandri said that in addition to being a \u201chomecoming of sorts,\u201d the annual celebration of Italian culture is also \u201ca snapshot of the tremendous growth of this great historic ethnic neighborhood\u201d that belongs to Downtown San Diego.<\/p>\n \u201cOur FESTA!, which stresses the positive contributions of Italian Americans to American culture and to the city of San Diego\u2019s history, has grown into the largest single day Italian American festival in the country today,\u201d LiMandri said. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Little Italy\u2019s 21st annual FESTA! will be held Sunday, Oct. 11, from 10 a.m. \u2013 6 p.m. For more information, visit\u00a0littleitalysd.com<\/a>. Volunteers are welcome.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u2014Gina McGalliard is a local freelance writer. You can contact her at\u00a0ginamcgalliard@gmail.com<\/a>\u00a0or follow her blog, ginamcgalliard.com\/mcgalliardmatters<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Por Gina McGalliard<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1144,"featured_media":237990,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"An Italian homecoming","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11547,11600,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-features","category-sdnews","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"DSC_2511webtop\"](\"https:\/\/sandiegodowntownnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/DSC_2511webtop.jpg\")
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