On a July evening, when the light goes copper over the water and the bandstand throws its shadow back towards Broadway, you can stand on the boulevard at Revere Beach and hear three generations of one family arguing happily over a box of pizza from a window with no seats. This is the easiest way to understand the Italians in Revere, Massachusetts: a seaside city five miles north of Boston that became, by the numbers, the most Italian place in the state. More than a third of Revere claims Italian ancestry, and the proof is not in a museum. It is in the delis, the parish feast, the sub shops, and the surnames on the awnings.
The Place
Revere sits on the Atlantic just north and east of East Boston, a small coastal city of about 62,000 people wrapped around three miles of sand. It was carved out of older towns over two centuries, known first as Rumney Marsh, then as part of Chelsea, later North Chelsea. On 24 March 1871 the town renamed itself for Paul Revere, the silversmith and Revolutionary War rider, and it incorporated as a city in 1915.
What made Revere is the beach. In 1896 it became the first public beach in the United States, a deliberate act of the state rather than an accident of fashion. The city is stitched together by the MBTA Blue Line, which runs along the old railway alignment and ends at Wonderland, and by neighbourhoods with their own characters: Beachmont on the easterly headland, Point of Pines out on the spit, Oak Island, and Shirley Avenue, long the most ethnically mixed corner of the city.
How It Became Italian
Revere did not start Italian. Its first immigrant identity, in the late nineteenth century, was Jewish, and the Shirley Avenue district filled with families who had left Poland and Russia. The Italians arrived alongside and after them, and they arrived from a very particular direction: the water side of Boston, a short hop south.
The North End and East Boston first
The story of Italian Revere begins in Boston’s North End and across the harbour in East Boston, the two places where Italian immigrants made their first dense American settlements. From the 1880s onward, ships landed newcomers who clustered in those tight working harbour districts. East Boston in particular became a beachhead, where one family’s arrival pulled the next from the same village in Italy.
For decades that was the centre of gravity. But cities like that are crowded by design, and the next generation wanted air, a yard, and a little distance from the tenement. Revere, just to the north, offered all three, and the sea.
The parish arrives, 1905
By 1905 the Italian population in Revere had grown large enough that the community founded its own Catholic parish, Saint Anthony of Padua. That date is the firmest milestone in the city’s Italian timeline. A parish is not founded for a handful of families. It is founded when there are enough Italians to fill the pews and bury the grandparents, and when those families want their own saint, their own feast, and Mass said in a church that feels like home.
The community kept growing through the early twentieth century. By 1924 the parish had built St. Anthony’s at its present location on Revere Street, and the first Mass in the new church was offered in 1926. The church became the anchor the rest of Italian Revere organised itself around.
The great move north after the war
The decisive shift came after the Second World War. Through the mid-twentieth century, suburbanisation and rising prosperity let younger Italian Americans leave the harbour neighbourhoods for nearby towns. The names recur in every account of the period: Revere, Winthrop, Everett, and Saugus.
This was upward mobility made visible. A family that had rented two rooms in East Boston could, a generation on, buy a triple-decker in Beachmont. The children grew up with a beach at the end of the street instead of a wharf. East Boston’s Italian share fell steadily as Revere’s rose, until by the later decades of the century East Boston was less than fifteen percent Italian by documented residents, and Revere had quietly become the most Italian city in Massachusetts.
What the families brought with them
They brought the institutions whole. The parish, the feast day, the bakery, the social club, the habit of Sunday dinner that runs from early afternoon into the evening. They brought a particular New England Italian identity, neither the North End’s tourist gloss nor a southern village preserved in amber, but something local and lived-in. Revere Italian is a sub from a counter where the man slicing the mortadella knows your father.
The Landmarks
St. Anthony of Padua Church, 250 Revere Street. The spiritual anchor of Italian Revere, the parish was founded in 1905 when the community first grew large enough to need its own church. The present building dates to 1924, with its first Mass in 1926. For a century it has been the place where Revere’s Italian families have married, mourned, and gathered for the feast of their patron saint.
New Deal Fruit, 920 Broadway. Run by the Petruzzelli family for well over fifty years and now into a fourth generation, this is the heart of edible Italian Revere. The family once peddled produce from a horse-drawn wagon. Today the warehouse-sized store is part Italian market, part deli, stacked with imported pasta, olive oil, cheeses, and bread, and famous across the North Shore for its oversized subs.
DeMaino’s Restaurant, 14 Malden Street. A long-running Italian restaurant tucked off the main drags, the kind of neighbourhood room where the menu is unapologetically red-sauce. It is the sit-down counterpart to the city’s many counter-service institutions, the place for a full Sunday meal out.
Bianchi’s Pizza, 381 Revere Beach Boulevard. Established in 1953 and the oldest family-owned business on Revere Beach, Bianchi’s is a slice window with no seats and a line that never stops moving. It is one of the few spots around Boston that turns out a genuinely New York-style slice, and on a summer night the queue down the boulevard is its own civic ritual.
Kelly’s Roast Beef, 410 Revere Beach Boulevard. Founded on the beach in 1951, Kelly’s is the other half of Revere’s beachfront eating duo, a regional institution that grew from a single shoreline stand into a small chain. It is not Italian, but no honest account of the boulevard leaves it out: it and Bianchi’s are the twin landmarks every Revere family measures the beach by.
Revere Beach and its bandstand. The reason the city exists in its modern form, the beach became America’s first public ocean beach in 1896. Its bandstand and long pavilions, designed by the firm Stickney & Austin and built in 1897 and 1905, line the crest of the sand along a promenade laid out by Charles Eliot of the Olmsted firm. It is the front yard of Italian Revere.
The site of Wonderland, off the Blue Line. Wonderland Greyhound Park opened on 12 June 1935 on the grounds of a former amusement park, drawing 5,000 people on its first night and, for decades, ranking among the premier dog tracks in the world. A statewide ban closed it on 19 August 2010, and the grandstand has since come down. The Blue Line stop still carries the name.
Where They Came From
The Italians who built Revere did not, for the most part, come straight from Italy to the beach. They came by way of Boston, and the deeper origins trace back to the same regions that fed all of Italian New England. Among the Italians of East Boston, from which so many Revere families descend, the majority listed birthplaces in the provinces of Calabria and Sicily, the hard, sun-baked south. A smaller share came from northern Italy, chiefly Liguria and Abruzzi.
That southern weight matters, because it shaped the food, the feast traditions, and the dialects that older Revere residents still half-remember. The chain ran village to harbour to city: a man arrives in East Boston, sends for his brother, the brother sends for a cousin, and twenty years on the whole extended family has reassembled itself in Revere.
Revere’s Italian community is best understood as part of a wider New England map. The same migration that filled Revere also built the Italian quarters Atlas of Home has traced elsewhere, from the harbour settlement of Italians in East Boston to the enclave of Italians in Nonantum, Massachusetts, and down through Rhode Island to Italians in Cranston, Rhode Island and Italians in Johnston, Rhode Island. The same pattern of upward mobility that carried Revere’s families out of the harbour shows up in the New York and New Jersey suburbs too, from Italians in New Rochelle, New York to Italians in Clifton, New Jersey.
Revere Today
Revere is still, statistically, the most Italian city in Massachusetts, with more than a third of residents claiming Italian ancestry. But it is no longer only Italian, and that is the honest present tense. The same beach and affordable streets that once drew Italians out of East Boston now draw new arrivals, and Revere has become one of the most foreign-born cities in the state, with a large Latin American community alongside Moroccan and Brazilian families. Shirley Avenue, Italian and Jewish in turn, now carries shop signs in several languages.
For the Italian community that remains, the markers hold. St. Anthony’s still rings out over Revere Street, and New Deal Fruit still slices the subs. The summer brings the Revere Beach International Sand Sculpting Festival, held each July since 2004, which pulls close to a million people to the boulevard where Bianchi’s and Kelly’s have stood since the early 1950s. The festival is not an Italian event, but it happens on Italian Revere’s front lawn, and the families who have run the beach businesses for seventy years are in the thick of it.
What you find in Revere now is a community that has stopped being a destination and become a foundation. The grandchildren of the East Boston migrants have, in many cases, moved on again, further north. But the institutions stayed. Revere did not preserve its Italian identity by keeping everyone in. It preserved it by building things solid enough to outlast any single generation: a parish, a deli, a slice window, a beach.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Revere, Massachusetts?
The Italians in Revere, Massachusetts arrived largely from Boston’s North End and East Boston, the city’s first Italian immigrant districts. After the Second World War, suburbanisation and rising prosperity let younger Italian families leave the crowded harbour neighbourhoods for nearby towns like Revere, Winthrop, Everett, and Saugus, which offered yards, the beach, and a little more room.
What percentage of Revere is Italian?
More than a third of Revere residents claim Italian ancestry, which makes Revere the most Italian city in Massachusetts. Italian remains the single largest reported ancestry in the city, even as Revere has also become home to large Latin American, Moroccan, and Brazilian communities.
When did Italians first settle in Revere?
Italians had settled in Revere in significant numbers by 1905, the year the community founded its own Catholic parish, Saint Anthony of Padua. A parish is founded only when there are enough families to sustain it, so 1905 marks the point at which Italian Revere had truly taken root.
What is the main Italian church in Revere?
St. Anthony of Padua, at 250 Revere Street, is the historic Italian parish of Revere. Founded in 1905, the present church was built in 1924 and held its first Mass in 1926. It has anchored the Italians in Revere, Massachusetts for over a century.
Where can you find good Italian food in Revere?
New Deal Fruit at 920 Broadway, run by the Petruzzelli family for more than fifty years, is the city’s landmark Italian market and deli, famous for oversized hand-sliced subs. DeMaino’s Restaurant at 14 Malden Street is a long-running sit-down Italian spot, and on the beach, Bianchi’s Pizza has served slices since 1953.
What is Revere Beach known for?
Revere Beach became the first public ocean beach in the United States in 1896. Its bandstand and pavilions date to the late 1890s and 1900s, and each July since 2004 it hosts the International Sand Sculpting Festival, which draws close to a million visitors to the three-mile shoreline.
If your family’s story passed through Revere, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Calabria or Sicily, to a tenement in East Boston, to a triple-decker by the beach in Revere, to wherever you are now.