Every August, a statue of the Madonna moves slowly through the East End of Norristown, carried on the shoulders of twenty-five men, trailed by a brass band playing into the summer dusk. The Italians in Norristown have made this walk for more than a century, and the route has not changed. It winds past the row houses where their great-grandparents first unpacked their trunks, past the church where they still hear Mass, down streets named in English but lived in, for generations, in the dialect of a Sicilian fishing town.
The Place
Norristown is the county seat of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, set on the east bank of the Schuylkill River about seventeen miles north-west of central Philadelphia. It was laid out in 1784 on land the University of Pennsylvania had been granted, and it incorporated as a borough on 31 March 1812.
For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was a manufacturing town, turning out textiles, iron, steel, shoes, cigars, and at one point even bubblegum, all powered by the river and the Schuylkill canal. The population peaked at 38,925 in 1960.
This was never a wealthy suburb. It was a working town, and the Italians who came here came for the work.
How It Became Italian
The first Italians arrived in Norristown in the late 1880s, drawn by the most unglamorous labour the region had to offer: cutting stone in the quarries, swinging picks on railroad and construction gangs, and feeding the foundries along the river. They were not invited so much as tolerated, useful hands for the dirtiest jobs in a town busy getting rich on industry. Pennsylvania’s coal and quarry country drew labourers of every nation in those years, including the Lithuanians of Shenandoah in the anthracite fields to the north.
The East End
Where they could live was decided for them. The municipal government, landlords, and real estate agents steered Italian newcomers into the least developed corner of the borough, the East End, and that pattern of confinement held for the better part of fifty years. The East End became Norristown’s Little Italy by default, a grid of cramped row houses east of the courthouse where families doubled up and gardens crept into every spare yard.
It is worth saying plainly what that meant. The East End was not chosen as a homeland. It was the part of town nobody else wanted, handed to people nobody else wanted, who spent generations making it theirs.
Sciacca by the Schuylkill
Norristown’s Italians did not arrive from Italy in general. They came, in remarkable concentration, from specific places. The largest and most defining group came from Sciacca, a fishing town on the southern coast of Sicily, and they brought their patron with them.
The Sciacchitani carried the devotion to La Madonna del Soccorso di Sciacca, Our Lady of Help, whose festival back home commemorates a 1626 deliverance from plague. The vow their ancestors had made to honour the Madonna travelled across the Atlantic intact, and within a few years they were keeping the feast in Pennsylvania.
Other towns sent their own people and their own saints. Families from Casalduni and Benevento brought the devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Those from Montella in Campania honoured the Santissimo Salvatore, the Holy Saviour himself. Immigrants from Ascoli Piceno kept the feast of Saint Emidio. Norristown’s Italian community was, in effect, a federation of home towns, each clustered around its own patron, in the same way the Italians of Throgs Neck in the Bronx organised their corner of New York around shared villages of origin.
A church of their own
At first there was no Italian parish at all. For years the Italians of Norristown heard Mass at St Patrick’s, the Irish church, where they were guests rather than members. In time an Italian mission opened in the basement there, led by two Italian priests who preached, heard confessions, and gave the sacraments in the language people actually spoke.
Eventually the community got its own parish: Holy Saviour, Santissimo Salvatore, at 409 East Main Street, in the heart of the East End. The chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, out in the Black Horse section of Plymouth Township, became part of the same parish family, keeping the Casalduni and Benevento devotion alive at its own altar.
Mutual aid and the line of the dialect
The home town loyalties were not merely sentimental. They were institutional. Norristown’s mutual aid societies, the bodies that pooled pennies to bury the dead and tide over the sick, organised themselves strictly by origin. The SS. Maria del Soccorso Society, which sponsored the Sciacca feast, barred anyone who was not of Sicilian background.
That sounds clannish, and it was, but it was also survival. In a town that had pushed them to the margins, the society was the only insurance these families had. The M.S.S. Society was founded around the turn of the century, in its own words, to help poor Italian immigrants who had just entered Norristown.
The Verdi Band
In 1920, at the very peak of the immigration wave, a musician named Loreto Marsella organised about thirty men into the Verdi Band. Marsella, born in San Giovanni Incarico in 1874, became Norristown’s leading musician for decades, and he built the band to give homesick labourers a piece of the old country.
The men he recruited spent their days in mines, foundries, and sweatshops and their evenings rehearsing Verdi. The band played celebrations across Montgomery County, and in 1954 it took first prize at the Atlantic City Centennial. A century on, the Verdi Band still marches at the East End feasts, the same brass leading the same Madonna through the same streets.
The labourer’s son
One Norristown story carried further than the rest. In 1927, on the East End, Sabatino Lasorda and his wife Carmella, immigrants from Tollo in the Abruzzo region, had a son they named Thomas. Sabatino had come to America to join his brothers and find work he could not get at home, and he found it labouring around the Bethlehem Steel quarry operations near Norristown.
His son Tommy Lasorda grew up to manage the Los Angeles Dodgers, win two World Series, and reach the Baseball Hall of Fame. He never stopped talking about the Abruzzo father who arrived with nothing, and he carried Norristown’s East End with him to Chavez Ravine.
The Landmarks
Holy Saviour Church, 409 East Main Street. The Italian parish of Norristown, dedicated to the Santissimo Salvatore honoured by immigrants from Montella. It remains the spiritual centre of the East End and the church where the August feasts culminate in a solemn bilingual Mass before the statues go out into the streets.
The East End. The grid of row houses east of the county courthouse where Italian arrivals were steered for half a century. It was the borough’s Little Italy, and it is still the ground the feast processions cross every August, past homes that have stayed in the same families for four generations.
St Patrick’s Church, Norristown. The Irish parish where the first Italians heard Mass before they had a church of their own. The Italian mission that opened in its basement, staffed by two Italian priests, was the seed from which the community’s own religious life grew.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Chapel, Black Horse, Plymouth Township. A chapel of Holy Saviour parish that keeps the devotion brought by immigrants from Casalduni and Benevento. Its July feast, near the 16th, draws the descendants of those towns to a Grande Festa Italiana after the procession.
Saviour Hall, East Airy Street. Formerly Monsignor Delia Hall, this is where the Sciacca feast retreats after the procession for its indoor block party, with Italian food, an accordion, and the talk of families who have known one another for a hundred years.
Corropolese Italian Bakery and Deli, Norristown. A bakery and deli that has operated in the area for more than a century, long enough to have fed the original East End and its descendants. Its tomato pie and rolls are the kind of everyday Italian food that outlasts memory of where exactly the recipe came from.
Talluto’s Authentic Italian Food. An Italian food maker that brought its operation to the Norristown area in 1989, drawn, it said, by the strength of the local appetite for Italian cooking. It is a reminder that the market the immigrants built is still here to be served.
Where They Came From
Norristown’s Italians were overwhelmingly southern Italians and Sicilians, and they came in tight regional clusters rather than as a generic flow. The defining group sailed from Sciacca, a fishing town on Sicily’s southern coast, and they were numerous enough to make their Madonna the patron of the whole community’s most prominent feast.
Around them gathered smaller cohorts from the mainland south: from Casalduni and Benevento in Campania, from Montella, from Tollo in Abruzzo, from Ascoli Piceno in the Marche. Chain migration did the rest. One man came for work, found a job and a basement room, then sent for brothers, cousins, and finally wives and children, until a Sicilian street existed in Pennsylvania.
They came for the same reason most southern Italians left in those decades: there was no work and no future at home, and America, whatever its disappointments, at least had wages. Sabatino Lasorda’s story, leaving Abruzzo because he could not get work and joining brothers already in Norristown, was the ordinary story repeated thousands of times. The same Sicilian and southern Italian currents settled the Little Italy of Cleveland and the suburban enclaves of the Italians on Long Island in Massapequa and the Italians of Whitestone, Queens.
Norristown Today
Norristown is not the town the Italians arrived in, and it is honest to say it is not the town it was at its 1960 peak either. The factories closed, the population slipped, and by 2010 the borough’s poverty rate had reached 21.7 per cent against 7.1 per cent for Montgomery County as a whole. Government, healthcare, and legal work around the courthouse now anchor the economy where industry once did.
The Italians, meanwhile, did what later generations of immigrants do everywhere. Many moved out to the surrounding townships, taking their bakeries with them into a county that now also draws newer arrivals like the Indians of nearby Malvern. The East End that was once Little Italy is now substantially Mexican and Central American, a younger immigrant community settling into the same row houses for the same reason the Sciacchitani once did.
Yet the through line holds. Every August the M.S.S. feast still fills the East End streets, the oldest Italian feast in Montgomery County, with the Verdi Band leading the Madonna del Soccorso on the route her people have walked for over a century. The faces in the houses have changed. The walk has not.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Italians first settle in Norristown, Pennsylvania?
The Italians in Norristown first arrived in the late 1880s, drawn by work in the local quarries and on railroad and construction gangs. The community grew rapidly around the turn of the twentieth century during the borough’s industrial peak.
Where in Italy did Norristown’s Italians come from?
The largest group came from Sciacca, a fishing town on the southern coast of Sicily. Smaller cohorts came from Casalduni and Benevento, Montella, Tollo in Abruzzo, and Ascoli Piceno, with each home town keeping its own patron saint and devotion.
What is the Madonna del Soccorso feast in Norristown?
It is the annual August feast honouring La Madonna del Soccorso di Sciacca, brought by immigrants from Sciacca and sponsored by the M.S.S. Society. The oldest Italian feast in Montgomery County, it features a solemn Mass at Holy Saviour Church and a street procession through the East End led by the Verdi Band.
Which neighbourhood was Norristown’s Little Italy?
The East End, the grid of row houses east of the county courthouse, was where Italian immigrants were directed by landlords and officials for half a century. It became the heart of Italian life in Norristown and remains the route of the annual feast processions.
Is Tommy Lasorda from Norristown?
Yes. The Hall of Fame Dodgers manager was born in Norristown in 1927 to Italian immigrants from Tollo, in the Abruzzo region. His father Sabatino worked around the Bethlehem Steel quarry operations near the town.
Are there still Italians in Norristown today?
Many Italian families have moved out to surrounding Montgomery County townships, and the East End is now largely a Mexican and Central American community. But the Italian parishes, feasts, and the Verdi Band endure, and the descendants still return each August for the procession.
If your family’s story passed through Norristown, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a fishing quay in Sciacca to a row house in the East End, to wherever you are now.