They called it Little Italy, and for a while it was the closest thing to Sicily that Nebraska ever held. From the 1890s through the middle of the last century, if you walked south of downtown Omaha along 10th Street and turned onto Dahlman Avenue, you heard the dialect of one Sicilian town drifting from porch to porch. The smell of bread came from a brick oven on Pacific Street. And every December, and later every summer, a wooden saint went out into the streets on the shoulders of men whose grandfathers had carried her in a town called Carlentini, half a world away.
Little Italy: The Place
Little Italy sits in the river bottoms south of the Old Market, hemmed in by Pacific Street to the north, Center Street to the south, 10th Street to the west, and the Missouri River to the east. It grew up beside the railroad yards and the Burlington station, on cheap, flood-prone ground that wealthier Omahans did not want.
The housing was modest: small frame cottages and brick two-flats packed onto narrow lots, climbing the bluffs toward the smelter smoke. It was a working neighbourhood, close enough to the rail shops and the South Omaha packing plants for men to walk to work. The river was always near, and so was the noise of the trains that had brought everyone here.
How Little Italy Became Italian
Before the Italians
The flats below the bluffs were never prime real estate. They flooded, they sat in the shadow of the railroad, and the air carried lead and arsenic from the giant Omaha smelting works on the riverfront. That is exactly why the land was open to newcomers.
Before the Sicilians arrived in numbers, the area was a transient quarter of railroad labour and rooming houses. Omaha in the 1890s was a city built on two engines: the Union Pacific, headquartered in town, and the meatpacking houses of South Omaha. Both needed muscle, and neither cared much where it came from.
The Italians Arrive
The Italians in Omaha, Nebraska did not come from all over Italy. They came, overwhelmingly, from one small Sicilian town in the province of Syracuse: Carlentini, and the neighbouring city of Lentini. This is one of the purest examples of chain migration in the American Midwest.
Two brothers anchored it. Joseph and Sebastiano Salerno came from Carlentini and set themselves up south of downtown, opening a shoe shop and a second-hand clothing store, then a grocery, rooming houses, and eventually their own Bank of Sicily by 1908. From around 1904, Sebastiano worked as a steamship agent, writing home to recruit fellow Carlentinesi for jobs at the Union Pacific shops and the smelter.
It worked the way these things always worked. One man came, found a job and a bed, and sent for a brother or a cousin. By 1905 thousands of Sicilians had settled in the streets east of 10th and south of Pacific. A second-generation Omahan could trace nearly every family on the block back to the same square in Carlentini.
Little Italy at Its Peak
By the 1910s and 1920s the neighbourhood held well over two thousand Italians, and it functioned almost as a self-contained Sicilian village. The Salernos’ Bank of Sicily handled money and steamship tickets. Italian groceries, saloons, and bakeries lined the side streets.
The parish was the heart of it. The church that became St. Frances Cabrini opened in 1908 at 1335 South 10th Street, a handsome building designed by the noted Omaha architect Thomas Rogers Kimball. It was the spiritual centre where baptisms, weddings, and funerals stitched the families together.
Social life ran through the lodges. The Sons of Italy kept a hall at 1238 South 10th Street, and the old Fire Station 9 was reborn as Santa Lucia Hall. Men worked the rail yards and the packing plants by day and gathered in the halls at night. The pattern of one Italian neighbourhood feeding the next was repeated across America, from the tight Sicilian and Lombard streets of The Hill in St. Louis to the steelworkers’ enclaves elsewhere in the heartland.
The Change
The first blow was legal. The Immigration Act of 1924 slammed the door on large-scale Italian arrivals, and Carlentini stopped feeding new families into the neighbourhood. From then on, Little Italy grew up rather than out.
The second blow was prosperity. By the 1950s the children and grandchildren of the immigrants had money, cars, and acceptance, and many moved west to the suburbs. The grip of one town on one neighbourhood loosened with every move.
The third blow was concrete. The construction of Interstate 480 in the late 1950s and 1960s carved through Omaha’s Italian districts, taking homes and severing streets. Little Italy thinned out, its population scattered across the metro, though the parish and the festival held on. The same story of freeway and flight emptied Italian quarters across the country, including the steel-mill colonies of Pueblo, Colorado.
The Landmarks of Italian Little Italy
St. Frances Cabrini Church, 1335 South 10th Street. Opened in 1908 as St. Philomena’s and later renamed for the patron saint of immigrants, this is the anchor of the whole story. Designed by Thomas Rogers Kimball, it is where the Santa Lucia statue lives year round and where the festival’s Sunday procession begins and ends.
Orsi’s Italian Bakery and Pizzeria, 621 Pacific Street. Founded in 1919 by Alfonso Orsi, a Tuscan who left a family of olive and grape growers at sixteen, the bakery moved to its Pacific Street home in 1931. A craftsman brought from Italy built the brick oven still in use. After a 1997 fire gutted the building, the neighbourhood rallied to rebuild it, and it remains open, more than a century on.
Santa Lucia Hall, near 10th and William. Built in 1891 as Omaha’s Fire Station 9, the building was taken over by the Italian community and became the hall associated with the festival. Recent restoration work has preserved it as a tangible link to the neighbourhood’s founders.
The Sons of Italy Hall, 1238 South 10th Street. The lodge hall where the fraternal life of the neighbourhood played out, a meeting place for men whose days were spent in the rail shops and packing plants.
The Bank of Sicily, founded 1908. Started by the Salerno brothers, this was where immigrants who spoke no English could send money home, buy a steamship ticket for a relative, and keep their savings. It was the financial spine of the chain migration that built the place.
The Santa Lucia Festival. Not a building but the neighbourhood’s beating institution, founded in 1925 and still running today. For four days each summer the streets fill with food, music, and a statue carried on the shoulders of the descendants of the men who first brought her over.
The Santa Lucia Festival
The festival is the reason this neighbourhood still has a heartbeat. It was founded in 1925 by Grazia Bonafede Caniglia, a mother of six who had come from Carlentini in 1900 and who walked from Sixth and Pierce Streets at five every morning to pray at St. Philomena’s.
Grazia wanted to recreate the Santa Lucia celebration of her hometown, which had dedicated itself to the saint in 1621. To do it, the immigrants raised about two thousand dollars, a small fortune at the time, going door to door to collect money and treasures so a statue could be carved in Italy and shipped to America by boat.
That statue, depicting Santa Lucia holding a tray bearing her eyes, still leads the procession each year. The faithful drape her in donated jewels and gold, some of it dating to the festival’s earliest days. The Caniglia family remains involved generations later, and the festival has carried on continuously, reaching its 100th anniversary in 2024 and its 101st edition over the weekend of July 31 to August 3, 2025.
Where the Omaha Italians Came From
Almost the entire community traces to one corner of eastern Sicily: Carlentini and its larger neighbour Lentini, in the province of Syracuse. This is not a vague regional origin. It is one town, in the hills above the Catania plain, that sent a self-replicating wave of families to the Nebraska riverfront from the 1890s onward.
The bond never fully broke. When an earthquake struck near Carlentini on December 13, 1990, the saint’s own feast day, the Omaha community raised relief funds through St. Frances Cabrini parish. In recent years Omaha and Carlentini have become sister cities, and a Carlentini Plaza was installed in Dahlman Park to mark it. The kind of single-town pipeline that built Little Italy also built other Plains enclaves, from Italian steelworkers to the Czech farmers who turned Wilber, Nebraska into the Czech capital of the United States.
Little Italy Today
Little Italy is no longer a Sicilian village. Decades of suburban flight and the scar of Interstate 480 left a small, mixed neighbourhood, and its position beside the Old Market and the Henry Doorly Zoo has drawn developers, new apartments, and rising rents. The flats that nobody wanted in 1900 are now prime urban real estate.
Yet the Italian thread holds. Orsi’s still bakes bread and sells pizza on Pacific Street. St. Frances Cabrini still rings out over 10th Street, and in July 2025 the City of Omaha formally recognised Little Italy as a historic neighbourhood, giving it an official voice for the first time. Each summer the saint still processes through streets that are gentrifying around her.
Omaha keeps writing these chapters with each new arrival. The same blocks that absorbed Sicilians a century ago are part of a city that later welcomed others, a story we trace in our piece on the South Sudanese in Omaha, Nebraska. The faces change. The act of making a home from nothing does not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Little Italy, Omaha?
The Italians in Omaha, Nebraska settled in the river flats south of downtown because the land was cheap and close to work at the Union Pacific shops, the smelting works, and the South Omaha packing plants. Brothers Joseph and Sebastiano Salerno, who arrived from Carlentini, Sicily, recruited fellow townspeople and anchored the community. Chain migration did the rest, with one family pulling the next across.
Is Little Italy in Omaha still Italian today?
Little Italy is no longer a majority-Italian neighbourhood. Suburban flight and the building of Interstate 480 scattered most families across the metro by the late twentieth century. The Italian legacy survives through St. Frances Cabrini Church, Orsi’s Bakery, and the annual Santa Lucia Festival, and the area is now gentrifying beside the Old Market.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks in Little Italy, Omaha?
The best-known landmarks are St. Frances Cabrini Church at 1335 South 10th Street, opened in 1908, and Orsi’s Italian Bakery and Pizzeria at 621 Pacific Street, founded in 1919. Santa Lucia Hall, the former Sons of Italy hall, and the Santa Lucia Festival itself round out the community’s surviving institutions.
Where in Italy did the Omaha Italians come from?
Almost all of the Italians in Omaha, Nebraska came from Carlentini and nearby Lentini, in the province of Syracuse in eastern Sicily. It is a striking case of single-town chain migration that began in the 1890s. Omaha and Carlentini are now officially sister cities.
When did Italians first arrive in Little Italy, Omaha?
Sicilians began settling south of downtown Omaha in the 1890s, with the largest wave arriving around 1905 after the Salerno brothers began recruiting from Carlentini. By the 1910s and 1920s the neighbourhood held more than two thousand Italians. The Immigration Act of 1924 ended large-scale arrivals.
If your family’s story passed through Little Italy, or any of the places Sicilians made home in America, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From a single square in Carlentini to the river flats of Omaha, to wherever you are now. Explore your story →
Sources: Little Italy, Omaha (Wikipedia) and the Santa Lucia Festival history.