Order a pizza in Old Forge and you will be quietly corrected. There are no slices here, only cuts. There are no pies, only trays. The Italians in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, did not just settle a coal borough in the Lackawanna Valley. They rewrote the rules of an American food, then taught a town of barely eight thousand to call itself the Pizza Capital of the World and mean it.
The Place
Old Forge sits in the southern end of Lackawanna County, a few miles down the valley from Scranton, hard against the Lackawanna River. It is a small borough, a single Main Avenue lined with low storefronts, the kind of place you could drive through in ninety seconds if the smell of baking dough did not slow you down.
For most of a century its fortunes ran on anthracite, the hard coal buried in seams beneath the whole region. The mines are gone now. What remains is a town that has turned its immigrant inheritance into an identity sharp enough to draw visitors from across the country.
How It Became Italian
Old Forge was not built by Italians. It was claimed by them.
Mudtown and the mines
The settlement traces back to 1789, when the Reverend Doctor William Hooker Smith put up a forge on the river, giving the place its name. By the time it was organised as a township in 1871 and incorporated as a borough on 2 May 1899, locals knew it by a less flattering name: Mudtown. Anthracite mining dominated everything, with a small silk industry alongside it.
The coal needed labour, and a great deal of it. In the early 1900s the breakers and collieries of the valley pulled in immigrants by the thousand, and a striking share of them came from one corner of southern Italy. The borough’s own records trace the shift clearly.
The people from Felitto
Most of Old Forge’s Italians traced back to Felitto, a mountain town in the Cilento, inland from the city of Salerno in Campania. Families from the southern province of Salerno found ready work in the Pennsylvania coalfields, and once a few households were established they sent for the rest. The pattern was classic chain migration: one cousin’s letter home pulled the next family across the Atlantic, until whole streets of Old Forge answered to the same handful of surnames.
The work was brutal and the treatment often worse. Italian miners took the most dangerous jobs for the lowest pay and lived in the company’s shadow. Yet the population swelled. Old Forge passed 12,000 residents by the 1930 census and topped 14,000 at its peak in the 1920s, a remarkable density for so small a footprint, and the Italian share kept climbing.
The end of coal
The reckoning came on 22 January 1959, a few miles up the valley at Port Griffith, when the Susquehanna River broke through into the Knox Mine. The Knox Mine Disaster drowned the workings, killed twelve men, and effectively ended deep anthracite mining across the region. Towns that had lived on coal for three generations had to find another reason to exist.
Old Forge had been quietly building one in its kitchens for decades. The mines closed, the population thinned, and the families who stayed leaned harder on the one thing nobody could take underground: their food.
A community that stayed Italian
What is unusual about Old Forge is not that Italians arrived. It is that they never really left, and never diluted. As recently as the 2010 census, 41.3 percent of residents claimed Italian ancestry, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the United States. In a country where ethnic enclaves tend to scatter within a generation or two, Old Forge held.
The 2020 census counted 8,497 people, well below the coal-era peak. But walk Main Avenue today and the surnames over the doors, the Sunday Mass schedule, and the festival posters all tell the same story. This is still, unmistakably, an Italian town.
The Landmarks
Arcaro & Genell, 443 South Main Street. One of the anchors of Old Forge’s pizza row, Arcaro & Genell has fed the borough its rectangular trays for generations and turned up on national best-pizza lists more than once. It is the kind of room where the waitresses know the regulars and the white American cheese is non-negotiable.
Revello’s Pizza, 502 South Main Street. Established in 1967 as Pelosi’s and later renamed, Revello’s is the rival a block down the street, and the argument over which tray is better has run for half a century without resolution. Both have carried the town’s name onto best-in-the-state rankings, which is exactly how Old Forge likes it.
Salerno’s Cafe, 139 Moosic Road. Started nearly a century ago by Vito Salerno, this is one of the oldest pizzerias in the borough, family-run for more than ninety years. Its name is no accident: Salerno is the very province the founding families came from, stamped onto a Pennsylvania storefront.
The site of Ghigiarelli’s. The story begins here. Philomena Ghigiarelli is widely credited with making the first Old Forge pizza around 1926, baking trays, not pies, and serving cuts to the coal miners who gathered for her husband Erminio’s card games. Every rectangular pan in town descends from that kitchen.
Prince of Peace Parish, with St. Mary’s and St. Lawrence churches. The borough’s Roman Catholic congregations were consolidated into Prince of Peace Parish, with St. Mary’s as the principal worship site. These are the churches where the Italian families were baptised, married, and buried, and where the year’s most important Mass is still said each September.
The Felittese Festival grounds, 145 Third Street. For more than three decades, on the second weekend of September, the Felittese Association has staged Old Forge’s Italian festival in honour of Our Lady of Constantinople, venerated in Felitto since 1790. The tables groan with gnocchi, soffritto, porketta, pizza fritta, and cavatelli with broccoli, all of it homemade.
Old Forge High School. A small public school for a small borough, but a point of pride, and a stop on the itinerary when a delegation from Felitto crossed the Atlantic in 2024 to see for themselves the town their ancestors helped build.
Where They Came From
The thread runs almost entirely to one place: Felitto, in the province of Salerno, in the Cilento hills of Campania. It is a town known at home for its handmade fusilli pasta and its long devotion to Our Lady of Constantinople, a feast it has kept since 1790.
That single origin is what makes Old Forge unusual. Many Italian-American communities are a blend of regions, north and south, city and countryside. Old Forge is overwhelmingly Cilentano, and the proof is in the kitchen: the homemade pasta, the specific saint, the sweeter sauce, all carried intact from one mountain town to one coal borough.
In September 2024 the two places made the bond official. After years of effort led by Felittese Association head Jeff Casella, Old Forge and Felitto were named sister cities, and a delegation from Italy, including Felitto council president Antonio Sabetta, came to Old Forge for the festival. “The warmth that people from Old Forge have is actually similar to our way of behaving,” Casella said. The valley a continent away still recognised its own.
Old Forge Today
The coal is finished and the population is a little over half what it once was, but Old Forge has done something most former mining towns could not. It found a second life that draws people in rather than sends them away.
That life runs on pizza. More than a dozen shops cluster in a borough of fewer than nine thousand people, each guarding its own blend of cheeses and its own sauce, each insisting it is the truest expression of the Old Forge style. Food writers and television crews make the pilgrimage. The signs at the borough line do not exaggerate for tourists; the town genuinely believes it is the Pizza Capital of the World, and it has the trays to back the claim.
The festival still fills Third Street every September. The sister-city ties are now formal. The churches still say the Mass for Our Lady of Constantinople. For a town built on a vanished industry, Old Forge has kept hold of the harder thing, which is not the coal but the culture the miners brought with them. The Italians who came to dig anthracite left something far more durable than the mines: a recipe, a saint, and a name worth keeping.
Old Forge sits within a stretch of Pennsylvania shaped by immigrant labour. Just up the valley, the Welsh built Scranton on the same anthracite seams, and across the state the Poles settled Erie and the Slovaks came to Bethlehem for industrial work. The Old Forge story also rhymes with other tight-knit Italian enclaves, from the Italians in Endicott, New York to the Italians in Waterbury, Connecticut and the Italians in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Old Forge, Pennsylvania?
The Italians in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, arrived in the early 1900s to work the anthracite coal mines of the Lackawanna Valley. Most came from Felitto, a single mountain town near Salerno in southern Italy, drawn by chain migration as established families sent for their relatives. By the 2010 census, 41.3 percent of Old Forge residents claimed Italian ancestry.
Why is Old Forge called the Pizza Capital of the World?
Old Forge is home to more than a dozen pizzerias in a borough of fewer than nine thousand people, all serving a distinctive rectangular, double-crusted pizza. The style is credited to Philomena Ghigiarelli, who baked trays for coal miners around 1926. The town adopted the “Pizza Capital of the World” title to honour that density and tradition.
What is Old Forge style pizza?
Old Forge pizza is baked rectangular in a metal pan and ordered by the “tray,” not the pie, and eaten in “cuts,” not slices. It has a thick, crisp crust, a slightly sweet sauce, and a blend of cheeses, usually mozzarella with white American or mild cheddar. There is also a double-crust version filled with cheese.
Where did the Italians in Old Forge come from?
Almost all of Old Forge’s founding Italian families came from Felitto, in the province of Salerno in the Cilento region of Campania. In 2024 Old Forge and Felitto were formally named sister cities, recognising more than a century of direct family ties between the two communities.
What is the Felittese Festival in Old Forge?
The Felittese Italian Festival is held on the second weekend of September in honour of Our Lady of Constantinople, a devotion the town of Felitto has kept since 1790. Run by the Felittese Association for more than thirty years, it features homemade dishes like gnocchi, porketta, pizza fritta, and cavatelli with broccoli.
What happened to coal mining in Old Forge?
Anthracite mining sustained Old Forge for generations, but the Knox Mine Disaster of 22 January 1959, when the Susquehanna River flooded the workings nearby, effectively ended deep mining across the region. The Italians in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, who had built their lives around the mines turned increasingly to food, family businesses, and their churches.
If your family’s story passed through Old Forge, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a mountain town in the Cilento to a tray of pizza on Main Avenue, to wherever you are now.