The shouting starts before the coffee is poured. By six on a Saturday in May, the awnings are cranked open along 9th Street, and the smell is olive oil and basil and wet ice melting under the fish.
A pushcart owner is hollering prices in an accent that belongs to no specific town in Italy any more, only to South Philly. A woman pushes a wheeled cart past barrels of provolone, past a cannoli case, past a butcher slicing prosciutto so thin you can read the price tag through it.
This is the oldest outdoor market in America. On the right morning it can still feel like 1925.
South Philadelphia, The Place
South Philadelphia sits below South Street, fenced in by the Delaware on one side and the Schuylkill on the other. The Italian-American core runs roughly between Washington Avenue and Snyder Avenue, with 9th Street as its spine. The housing is brick rowhouse on brick rowhouse, marble stoops scrubbed in the morning, narrow streets that were never built for a Ford F-150.
The Broad Street Line subway slices straight down the middle, and on a January morning the Mummers come strutting up that same Broad Street in feathered costumes that take a year to build. South Philly is working-class, residential, stubborn, and deeply local. You can be born here, live your whole life inside six blocks, and never feel like you have missed anything.
How South Philadelphia Became Italian
Before the Italians
Before the Italians, South Philadelphia was Irish, German, and Jewish, with a scattering of free Black families who had lived in the area for generations. The land south of South Street was the city’s overflow, a place of small workshops, tanneries, and modest rowhouses thrown up for the workers who poured into Philadelphia after the Civil War.
There were Italians here long before the great wave. The first Italian Catholic parish in the United States was founded right in South Philly in 1852, when Bishop John Neumann opened St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi for a small congregation of skilled northern Italian craftsmen, many of them from Liguria. For thirty years it was a curiosity, a tiny parish in a city that was overwhelmingly Irish and German Catholic. Then, around 1880, the curiosity became a flood.
The Italians Arrive
The flood came from the south. Between 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians sailed for the United States, and more than eight out of ten of them came from below Rome, from the regions Italians call the Mezzogiorno: Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata.
They came because the southern Italian economy had collapsed. Phylloxera ruined the vineyards. Volcanic eruptions ruined the soil. The new Italian state, unified only in 1861, taxed the south to pay for the north. Earthquakes flattened whole villages. A peasant farmer in Sicily or Avellino could work himself to bone and still not feed five children.
Philadelphia, meanwhile, was building. The railroads needed track-layers, the shipyards needed welders, the garment factories needed seamstresses, the subway tunnels needed diggers. An Italian immigrant named Antonio Palumbo opened a boarding house in the 1880s for the men coming off the ships at the Washington Avenue piers. Around his boarding house, the rest of it grew. A grocer to feed the men. A pushcart selling tomatoes and figs. A barber. Another boarding house. Within a generation, the streets between Washington and Federal were Italian.
By 1890 there were roughly 10,000 Italian-born Philadelphians and their children. By 1920 the number was 136,793. Most of them lived inside the few square miles south of South Street.
South Philadelphia at Its Peak
What people called “Little Italy” was never one neighbourhood. It was a patchwork of villages stitched together by chain migration, each block holding the families and friends of a specific Italian town. Ellsworth Street was Catanzaro, the rugged Calabrian province whose people kept their dialect for two generations. The corner of Eighth and Fitzwater was Abruzzo. Other blocks were Sicilian, or Avellino, or Salerno. A wedding on one block might have a guest list that mapped a single mountain village in southern Italy.
The parish church gave the rhythm. St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi was joined by St. Paul’s at 10th and Christian, Our Lady of Good Counsel, St. Nicholas of Tolentine at 9th and Watkins. Each parish ran a school, a feast day, a procession of saints through the streets in summer.
Then there was 9th Street. The pushcarts came out of the Washington Avenue ferries that brought New Jersey produce across the river, and by the early 1900s the carts had become wooden stalls, and the stalls had become brick storefronts with the family living upstairs. In 1915 the City of Philadelphia officially chartered the 9th Street Curb Market. It has not stopped operating since.
The Change
The 1924 Immigration Act slammed the door. Quotas designed by people who did not like southern Europeans cut Italian immigration to a trickle. After 1924, South Philly stopped growing by ship and started growing by birth.
The neighbourhood peaked in the 1950s, when South Philadelphia was as Italian as any place in America. Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and Bobby Rydell all grew up within a few blocks of each other and all became teen idols on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which was being filmed at 46th and Market. Mario Lanza, born Alfredo Cocozza at 636 Christian Street in 1921, had become a movie star and the most famous operatic tenor in America.
Then the change came that comes to every immigrant neighbourhood. The grandchildren went to college. They bought houses in the suburbs, in Glenside and Cherry Hill and South Jersey. The corner butcher’s son became a dentist. The parish school enrolment thinned. By the 1990s, the Italian-American population of South Philly was older, smaller, and quieter than it had been at any point since Antonio Palumbo opened his boarding house.
The Landmarks of Italian South Philly
The 9th Street Italian Market (Mercato Italiano), 9th Street between Christian and Wharton. The market itself is the landmark. America’s oldest continuously operating outdoor market, chartered 1915, with roots in the pushcarts of the 1880s. Seven blocks long, awnings overhanging the sidewalks, oil drums burning in winter to keep the vendors warm. If you have seen Rocky run through a street market with the music swelling, you have seen this place.
Pat’s King of Steaks, 1237 East Passyunk Avenue. Founded in 1930 by brothers Pat and Harry Olivieri, who were selling hot dogs at a stand on this corner when Pat thinned out some beef on the griddle for his own lunch. A passing cabbie smelled it and asked for one. The cheesesteak was born on this corner, and Pat’s has been here ever since.
Geno’s Steaks, 1219 South 9th Street. Opened in 1966 by Joey Vento with six dollars in his pocket, directly across the intersection from Pat’s, more or less as an act of defiance. The two have been arguing about chopped versus sliced steak for sixty years. The intersection itself, 9th and Passyunk, is the most-photographed cheesesteak corner in the world.
Ralph’s Italian Restaurant, 760 South 9th Street. Opened by Francesco Dispigno in 1900, Ralph’s has the credible claim to being the oldest Italian restaurant in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt named it his favourite restaurant in Philadelphia. Five generations of the Dispigno and Rubino families have run it. The dining rooms still have the same pressed-tin ceilings.
Sarcone’s Bakery, 758 South 9th Street. Luigi Sarcone opened the bakery in 1918, and the seeded hoagie roll he developed became the gold standard for the Philly sandwich. Five generations on, the bakery is still in the family and the same coal-fired hearth oven is still running every morning.
Termini Bros Bakery, 1523 South 8th Street. Brothers Giuseppe and Gaetano Termini brought their recipes from Enna, Sicily and opened their pasticceria in 1921. The cannoli are filled to order. The third generation runs it now, and the wedding-cookie tray you brought to your cousin’s communion in 1987 almost certainly came from here.
Isgro Pasticceria, 1009 Christian Street. Founded in 1904, Isgro is the other essential South Philly bakery, just a few blocks from Termini. A century in, the cannoli shells are still rolled on wooden dowels and the ricotta is still piped on order.
Di Bruno Bros, 930 South 9th Street. The brothers Danny and Joe Di Bruno opened their cheese shop in 1939, and the 9th Street store is still the company’s spiritual home. The cheese cave, the antipasti bar, fifty linear feet of olive oils and tinned fish. It is the closest thing to walking into an Italian alimentari without flying nine hours.
The Mario Lanza Institute and Museum, 1214 Reed Street. Founded in 1962 to honour the South Philly tenor born at 636 Christian Street, the museum is small, free, and full of fan letters, programmes, and photographs. After several moves it now sits in a Passyunk Square storefront, run by volunteers who remember when Lanza was the most famous voice in America.
Where the South Philly Italians Came From
The South Philly Italians did not come from “Italy”. They came from specific villages in specific provinces, and the neighbourhood organised itself around those origins. The province of Catanzaro in Calabria sent so many families to Ellsworth Street that locals knew the street by the village name. Abruzzo, particularly the Pescara and Chieti hills, filled the streets around 8th and Fitzwater. Messina and the western Sicilian towns, including Marsala, sent families to other blocks. Campania, especially Avellino and Salerno provinces, sent thousands. Smaller streams came from Apulia and Basilicata.
The specificity mattered. A grocer on Christian Street might stock only the dialect of olive oil his customers from Caggiano would recognise. A funeral director on 10th Street knew which Abruzzese village a family belonged to before he asked. Chain migration meant cousins pulled cousins, and townsmen sponsored townsmen, and a single Sicilian village could end up with more of its sons in Philadelphia than at home.
South Philadelphia Today
Walk 9th Street now and you can still buy a cannoli at Termini, a seeded roll at Sarcone’s, a cheese at Di Bruno, a cheesesteak at Pat’s or Geno’s. The Italian Market Festival shuts down seven blocks every May, the greased pole goes up, the Procession of Saints leaves from St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi on Sunday morning. East Passyunk Avenue, once an aging Italian commercial strip, has gentrified into one of the best restaurant rows in the country, and the new tenants are as likely to be cooking Israeli or Filipino food as Italian.
But the market has changed. South of Washington Avenue, the southern half of 9th Street is now half Mexican. Taquerias share awnings with Italian butchers. A linguistic study found that between 2021 and 2023 the share of English-language signs in the market fell from 72 percent to 51 percent, while Spanish signage doubled. Vietnamese pho counters, Cambodian markets, and Venezuelan arepa stalls fill blocks that were once entirely Italian. The Frank Rizzo statue at the market’s edge, a symbol of the old neighbourhood’s harder politics, was removed in 2020.
None of this is a loss. It is the same story playing out one cycle later. The Mexican families running fruit stalls today are doing what the Palumbo family did in 1885. The Vietnamese baker is the Sarcone of 2040. The Italian community is older, smaller, and more suburban than it was, but it is also still here, still loud, still cooking. The street that started with Calabrian pushcarts is now a working monument to the idea that American neighbourhoods are layered, not preserved. New people arrive. They feed everyone. They become the story.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in South Philadelphia?
Italians settled in South Philadelphia in large numbers starting in the 1880s because the neighbourhood offered cheap rowhouse rents close to the Washington Avenue port where the ships docked, abundant unskilled work in railroads, shipyards, and garment factories, and an existing anchor in St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, the first Italian Catholic parish in the United States, founded in 1852. Chain migration did the rest, with each arriving immigrant pulling cousins and townsmen across the Atlantic.
Is South Philadelphia still Italian today?
South Philadelphia is still visibly Italian-American but no longer Italian in the way it was in 1950. The bakeries, butchers, and restaurants founded a century ago by Italian families are mostly still operating and still family-owned, and the May festival and Mummers Parade keep the cultural rhythm. But the community has aged and dispersed to the suburbs, and the southern half of 9th Street is now substantially Mexican, with Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Latin American businesses layered alongside the Italian ones.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks in South Philadelphia?
The headline landmark is the 9th Street Italian Market itself, which runs from Christian Street to Wharton Street and is the oldest continuously operating outdoor market in America. The cheesesteak corner at 9th and Passyunk, with Pat’s King of Steaks (founded 1930) on one side and Geno’s (1966) on the other, is iconic. Ralph’s Italian Restaurant (1900), Sarcone’s Bakery (1918), Isgro Pasticceria (1904), Termini Bros Bakery (1921), and Di Bruno Bros (1939) are all still in business and still family-run.
Where in Italy did the South Philly Italians come from?
The overwhelming majority came from the Mezzogiorno, the regions of southern Italy below Rome. The largest groups were from Abruzzo, the province of Catanzaro in Calabria, Sicily (especially Messina, Enna, and Marsala), and Campania (especially the provinces of Avellino and Salerno), with smaller streams from Apulia and Basilicata. South Philadelphia organised itself by region, with specific streets and blocks dominated by families from specific Italian villages.
When did Italians first arrive in South Philadelphia?
A small community of mostly northern Italian craftsmen lived in South Philadelphia by the 1850s, prompting Bishop John Neumann to found St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi in 1852. The mass migration began in the 1880s and ran until the 1924 Immigration Act, with the Italian-born population of Philadelphia and their children growing from around 10,000 in 1890 to nearly 137,000 by 1920. The 1950s were the peak of the community’s concentration and cultural visibility.
If your family’s story passed through South Philadelphia, or through any of the villages in Sicily, Abruzzo, Calabria, or Campania that fed it, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town outside Avellino, to a boarding house on 9th Street, to wherever you are now.