On a clear evening, the red lanterns of the Pagoda glow above Mount Penn, and the city of Reading spreads out below in a grid of brick rowhouses and church steeples. Among those steeples is one that began with twenty dollars of borrowed faith and a borrowed Protestant building. The story of the Italians in Reading, Pennsylvania starts there, on Franklin Street, where families from Abruzzo and Sicily turned a struggling railroad city into a place that smelled of fresh bread and simmering gravy on a Sunday.
The Place
Reading sits along the Schuylkill River in Berks County, the seat of a county of more than 428,000 people and, with roughly 95,000 residents at the 2020 census, the fourth most populous city in Pennsylvania. It grew up around iron, railroads and textiles, and for a stretch of the twentieth century Berks County was the largest manufacturer of full-fashioned hosiery in the world.
The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad made the city rich and then, with the long decline of anthracite coal after the Second World War, made it poor. When the mills closed, Reading reinvented itself as the self-styled outlet capital of the world, sending bargain hunters streaming off the highways.
It is not an affluent town today. Reading has carried one of the highest poverty rates of any small American city. But its bones are immigrant bones, and the Italians who came to work the mills left a mark that has outlasted the looms.
How It Became Italian
The Italians did not come to Reading for the scenery. They came because the city was hungry for labour, and because a steamship ticket and a cousin’s letter could carry a young man from a hill town in southern Italy to a hosiery floor in Berks County in a matter of weeks.
The first arrivals, 1880s to 1900
The earliest Italians reached Reading in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, drawn by the railroad yards, the foundries and the textile mills that needed hands. They settled in the heart of the city, clustering around Franklin Street and Third Street, within walking distance of the work.
They were mostly southern Italians, men from Abruzzo, from the territory now in Molise, and from Sicily, the regions that sent the great waves of the Italian diaspora to America. They came first as single men, boarding together, sending money home, and then sending for wives, parents and whole villages in the pattern of chain migration that built Little Italys across the country, from the Italians of Worcester, Massachusetts to the brass-mill Italians of Waterbury, Connecticut.
Before there was a church, there were societies. On 20 May 1899 the Spartaco Society received its certificate of incorporation from the Berks County courts, becoming the first Italian-American fraternal organisation in the county. Seven men founded it, with Salvatore Puccini as president, and its purpose was plain: to afford mutual aid to members in case of sickness, injury or misfortune. In a city with no Italian church and no Italian welfare net, the society was both insurance policy and parlour.
A parish of their own, 1904
For Catholic immigrants, a church in their own language was the centre of everything. Monsignor George Borneman, a German-American priest who had taken an interest in the city’s Italians, appealed to Archbishop Patrick Ryan of Philadelphia to send an Italian priest to Reading, and then purchased the former St. Mark’s Reformed Congregational Church at Schuylkill Avenue and Green Street for six thousand dollars.
On 2 October 1904, Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church was solemnly dedicated by the Most Reverend Diomede Falconio, the Apostolic Delegate to the United States. The first pastor was the Reverend Gusaldo Paonessa. For the first time, Reading’s Italians had a parish where the homilies, the confessions and the funeral prayers were spoken in the language of home.
The parish grew as fast as the immigration that fed it. In 1910 the Reverend Doctor Eugene Marchetti, born in Turin on 2 February 1892, became pastor. He saw the steady increase in the Italian-American population and pressed the archbishop for a parochial school, which opened under the direction of the Sisters of Saint Dorothy, who had themselves come from Italy. Generations of Italian children learned their letters within a few blocks of where their parents worked.
Mills, societies and the years of growth
Through the 1910s and 1920s the community thickened. Men worked the hosiery mills and the railroad, women took in piecework and ran boarding houses, and the mutual-aid societies multiplied, much as they did among the Italians of Rochester, New York and the shoe-factory Italians of Endicott, New York. In 1915 twenty-one men of Italian heritage founded the Beneficial Society Victor Emmanuel II, named for the king who had unified Italy, dedicated to aiding members in sickness and death and to the moral and social improvement of the Italian community in Reading.
The Spartaco Society outgrew its first quarters and in 1916 bought a former Baptist church at 407-409 Chestnut Street for twelve thousand dollars, the kind of purchase that announced an immigrant community had arrived to stay. The Reverend Leonard T. Miconi, who came from Reana del Roiale in the province of Udine, took over the parish in April 1938.
These were not quiet, invisible newcomers. The Order of the Sons of Italy and the local societies organised Columbus Day parades and Italian Days, public pageants in which the immigrants claimed a place in the civic life of a city that had not always wanted them.
The DiMaggio summer, 1941
The high-water mark of public pride came in the summer of 1941. On 10 August the parish held its Holy Rosary Day festival at Carsonia Park, the old amusement park east of the city, and the guest of honour was Joe DiMaggio, the son of Sicilian immigrants and the most famous Italian-American alive in the middle of his record-breaking season. For an immigrant community that had spent forty years proving it belonged, having the Yankee Clipper at the parish picnic was a kind of coronation.
The Landmarks
Holy Rosary Church, 237 Franklin Street. The mother church of Italian Reading, founded in a bought Protestant building in 1904 and rebuilt as the present church dedicated on 28 June 1953. More than a century of baptisms, weddings and funerals tie the city’s Italian families to this corner, and the parish school once stood beside it at 240 Franklin Street.
Spartaco Society, 407-409 Chestnut Street. The county’s first Italian fraternal society, incorporated in 1899 and housed since 1916 in a former Baptist church. It still operates as a club and restaurant, the oldest continuous Italian institution in Reading.
Beneficial Society Victor Emmanuel II, 311 Hazel Street. Founded in 1915 by twenty-one men as a mutual-aid society and still going after more than a hundred years, now a members’ club serving Italian food in the city’s south end. It is the kind of place where the recipes are older than anyone in the room.
Saint Marco Society, 4945 Commerce Street, Temple. Just north of the city in Muhlenberg Township, the Saint Marco Society has been a gathering place for Berks County Italians for generations. Its annual Italian Food Festival, held on the first full weekend of August, brings homemade lasagna, porchetta and sausage sandwiches, fried mushrooms and bocce to a wider public.
The Pagoda, Skyline Drive, Mount Penn. Not an Italian landmark, but the symbol every Reading family shares. Completed in 1908 as the centrepiece of a luxury resort that never came, the seven-storey wooden pagoda was donated to the city in 1911 and has watched over the rowhouses, including the Italian blocks below, for more than a century.
Carsonia Park site, Pennside. The amusement park east of the city where the parish held its festivals, including the 1941 Holy Rosary Day attended by Joe DiMaggio. The rides are long gone, but the memory of those summer gatherings remains part of the community’s story.
Franklin and Third Streets, downtown. The original heart of Italian Reading, where the first arrivals settled within walking distance of the mills and the railroad. The grocers and bakeries that once lined these blocks have thinned, but the parish that anchored the neighbourhood still stands a few streets over.
Where They Came From
Reading’s Italians were overwhelmingly southerners. They came from Abruzzo and the neighbouring territory that is now Molise, and from Sicily, the same Mezzogiorno that emptied its hill towns into the mills and mines of industrial America between 1890 and the First World War.
Not all of them were southern. The priests who shaped the parish came from the north: Eugene Marchetti from Turin in Piedmont, Leonard Miconi from the Friulian village of Reana del Roiale near Udine, and the Sisters of Saint Dorothy from Italy as well. It was a community led, as many were, by clergy from one part of Italy serving labourers from another.
What drew them was simple. Reading needed muscle for its hosiery mills, foundries and rail yards, and southern Italy had more young men than land. A relative already working a Reading loom could vouch for a cousin, find him a boarding bed and walk him to the mill gate. That is how a single village could reassemble itself, street by street, in a Pennsylvania city it had never heard of. The same logic shaped immigrant Reading more widely: just up the turnpike, the Poles of Erie and the Slovaks of Bethlehem followed nearly identical paths into Pennsylvania’s mills and mills towns.
Reading Today
The mills that brought the Italians are gone, and so are the open Italian blocks of Franklin Street. Reading today is a majority-Latino city, one of the centres of Puerto Rican and Dominican life in Pennsylvania, and the Italian presence is no longer measured in neighbourhoods but in institutions. At the 2020 census, residents claiming Italian ancestry made up only about one percent of the city.
Yet the institutions are stubborn. Holy Rosary still offers Mass on Franklin Street. The Spartaco Society still serves dinner on Chestnut Street, and the Victor Emmanuel II club still cooks on Hazel Street, both of them well past their hundredth birthdays. Each August the Saint Marco festival in nearby Temple draws crowds who may not live in the old blocks any more but who still come back for the porchetta and the bocce.
That is how an Italian community survives the loss of its neighbourhood. The grandchildren moved to Exeter and Wyomissing and the suburbs beyond, but they kept their clubs, their parish and their festivals, and they drive back into the city to use them. The Pagoda still glows red over a Reading that is more Caribbean than Calabrian now, and the Italians, fewer but rooted, are still part of what it watches over.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Italians first settle in Reading, Pennsylvania?
Italians began arriving in Reading in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, drawn by the city’s hosiery mills, foundries and railroad yards. By 1899 they had founded the Spartaco Society, and in 1904 they established Holy Rosary Church, marking the Italians in Reading as a settled community by the turn of the twentieth century.
Where in Reading did the Italian community live?
The earliest Italians clustered in downtown Reading around Franklin Street and Third Street, within walking distance of the mills and the railroad. Holy Rosary Church on Franklin Street became the geographic and spiritual centre of the neighbourhood.
What is Holy Rosary Church?
Holy Rosary is the Italian national parish of Reading, founded on 2 October 1904 when Monsignor George Borneman bought a former Protestant church for the city’s Italian Catholics. The present church at 237 Franklin Street was dedicated in 1953, and it remains the historic heart of the Italians in Reading.
Where in Italy did Reading’s Italians come from?
Most came from the southern regions of Abruzzo, the area now in Molise, and Sicily, part of the great wave of southern Italian emigration between 1890 and 1914. Several of the parish’s priests, however, came from the north, including Turin and the Friuli region near Udine.
Are there still Italian institutions in Reading today?
Yes. Holy Rosary Church, the Spartaco Society (1899) on Chestnut Street and the Beneficial Society Victor Emmanuel II (1915) on Hazel Street all still operate, and the Saint Marco Society in nearby Temple holds an Italian food festival each August.
Did Joe DiMaggio really visit Reading?
Yes. On 10 August 1941, during his record-breaking baseball season, Joe DiMaggio appeared as guest of honour at Holy Rosary Day, the parish festival held at Carsonia Park east of the city. It was a high point of public pride for the Italian community of Reading.
If your family’s story passed through Reading, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Abruzzo or Sicily, to a rowhouse off Franklin Street and a pew at Holy Rosary, to wherever you are now.