The fire hydrants give it away. Red, white, and green, painted in horizontal bands like a small Italian flag bolted to the pavement, they appear at the corner of every block once you cross Kingshighway and head west.
Somewhere a bocce ball clicks against another, a slow domestic sound that has carried on these streets for more than a hundred years. The bell tower of St. Ambrose rises above the brick bungalows at dusk, and a couple cast in bronze, suitcase in hand, watches the corner of Wilson and Marconi from the church lawn.
This is The Hill, and it is, by almost any reasonable measure, the most stubbornly Italian neighbourhood left in the United States.
The Hill, The Place
The Hill sits on the near south side of St. Louis, a tidy grid of about fifty-two blocks bounded by Manchester Avenue to the north, Kingshighway Boulevard to the east, Southwest and Columbia Avenues to the south, and Hampton Avenue to the west.
The land here was once the highest ground in the city, a long, slow rise from the Mississippi that locals still call La Montagna. Small frame houses and brick bungalows line the streets, most of them built between 1890 and 1925 by the immigrants who worked the clay pits and brickyards a few blocks away. It is a residential neighbourhood with a working-class bone structure, walked rather than driven, and the bakeries, butchers, social clubs, and trattorie are still mostly on the corners where someone’s grandfather opened them.
How The Hill Became Italian
Before the Italians
The Hill was not always called The Hill. In the mid-1800s the area was known as Cheltenham, a rough stretch of land on the western edge of the city where sulphur springs bubbled out of the bluffs and the Pacific Railroad had cut a station into the rise.
The story turns on clay. In 1849 a fire tore through fifteen blocks of downtown St. Louis, and the city responded by writing brick into the building code. Cheltenham happened to sit on a vast seam of high-quality fire clay. By the 1850s mining operations such as Evens and Howard and the Laclede Christy works were pulling clay out of the ground, firing it into brick and tile, and shipping it east. The neighbourhood needed labour, and it needed a lot of it.
The Italians Arrive
The first Italians stepped off the train at the Cheltenham stop in the 1880s. They came up from the Po Valley, mostly from Lombardia, and many came from a single town: Cuggiono, a place of fewer than 5,000 souls in the flat farmland west of Milan. A group of Cuggionesi had come to the United States in 1880 to work lead mines elsewhere in Missouri, and word travelled back to the village square that there was steadier money in the clay pits outside St. Louis.
They built the first wooden houses near the kilns. Wives and children followed, then cousins, then whole streets of cousins. By the 1890s a second current was running parallel to the first: Sicilians, mostly from the province of Caltanissetta, from villages like Cianciana, San Cataldo, and Mussomeli. They had come for the same jobs and the same reason. In their old country there were many people and very little land, and someone two villages over had sent home word.
The Hill at Its Peak
By 1907 the parish of St. Ambrose counted roughly 2,100 Lombards and more than 1,000 Sicilians living on what was then commonly called Fairmount Hill. The two groups did not, at first, mix easily. They spoke different dialects so distant they were nearly different languages, ate different food, and married within their own. The Lombards lived more toward Marconi and Macklind; the Sicilians clustered toward Shaw and Daggett. A child born on the wrong block in 1910 would be a curiosity at school for a week.
What held them together was the parish and the work. St. Ambrose, founded in 1903, was the only Italian national parish in the city, and on Sunday the Sicilians and the Lombards walked through the same doors. The men worked the clay pits, the brick kilns, the tile factories at Cheltenham and the railroad yards beyond. The women kept gardens that ran the length of the lot and raised chickens in the back. By the time the First World War ended, the older national divisions were thinning into something the next generation simply called Italian.
The population kept growing. At peak, somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people lived on The Hill, and the neighbourhood was, by most counts, more than ninety percent Italian. Every corner had a grocer, every street its own butcher. A boy growing up on Elizabeth Avenue in the 1930s would walk past three salumerie, two bakeries, and a tavern between his front door and the schoolhouse.
The Change
The clay ran low after the Second World War, and the kilns closed one after another through the 1950s and 1960s. The construction of Interstate 44 in the 1970s nearly cut the neighbourhood in two; community organisers fought it block by block and managed, eventually, to bend the route and keep The Hill intact. Highways elsewhere in St. Louis destroyed whole ethnic neighbourhoods. The Hill survived.
The second and third generations did what immigrant children do. They went to college, took jobs in the wider city, and many of them moved out to the suburbs, to St. Louis County and Kirkwood and Webster Groves. The Italian population of the neighbourhood thinned through the 1980s and 1990s. What it did not do was disappear.
The Landmarks of Italian The Hill
St. Ambrose Catholic Church (5130 Wilson Avenue) is the spiritual centre of The Hill and has been since 1903. The first church on the lot was wooden and burned in a fire in 1921. The current stone building, designed by Angelo Corrubia and modelled on the Sant’Ambrogio basilica in Milan, was completed in 1926.
The Italian Immigrants statue on the lawn, a bronze couple with a suitcase and a baby in arms, was sculpted by Rudolph Torrini and installed in 1972. It is the most photographed object on The Hill, and the only piece of public art in the United States that depicts an Italian immigrant family carrying its life across an ocean.
Charlie Gitto’s On The Hill (5226 Shaw Avenue) claims the invention of toasted ravioli, the dish that has since become the unofficial appetiser of the entire state of Missouri. The room was Angelo’s Bar in 1947, and on the night in question a cook named Mario Battocletti tipped a tray of fresh ravioli into a fryer instead of a pot of boiling water. They came out crisp and golden and someone shook a little parmesan over the top. Charlie Gitto Jr. bought the room decades later, inherited the recipe, and the rest is bar food history.
Mama’s on The Hill (2132 Edwards Street) sits in the building that was Mama Campisi’s, and before that Oldani’s, where Louis Oldani also laid claim to the toasted ravioli invention. The argument has never been settled and is, on The Hill, a polite running disagreement that flares up every few years in the St. Louis Magazine letters page.
Rigazzi’s (4945 Daggett Avenue) opened in 1957, the oldest continuously operating restaurant on The Hill, in a corner building from 1901. Lou Aiazzi and John Riganti mashed their surnames together for the sign and started serving the thirty-two ounce Frozen Fishbowl, a goblet of beer chilled to slush, modelled on glassware from the 1904 World’s Fair. The bar still sells around a thousand of them a week.
Cunetto House of Pasta (5453 Magnolia Avenue) began as a back room. Vince and Joe Cunetto ran a pharmacy on The Hill and cooked for friends on a two-burner stove behind the prescription counter. By 1974 enough people had eaten there that they sold the pharmacy and turned it into a restaurant. They have never advertised. The line at six on a Saturday is the only marketing they have ever needed.
Adriana’s on The Hill (5101 Shaw Avenue) opened in 1992. Adriana Fazio came from Sicily and ran the place with her daughters. Lunch only, foot-long sandwiches on bread baked that morning, and a line that wraps the corner of Shaw and Marconi every weekday from eleven.
The Italia-America Bocce Club (2210 Marconi Avenue) bought its own building in 1991 and runs five courts behind a quiet brick frontage. League nights run April through October. Membership is mostly old men who learned the game from their fathers, but lately the courts have filled up with grandchildren and a few transplants who married in.
Hall of Fame Place, the 5400 block of Elizabeth Avenue, was renamed in 2003. Yogi Berra was born Lawrence Peter Berra at 5447 Elizabeth Avenue on May 12, 1925, the son of immigrants from the village of Malvaglio, near Milan. Joe Garagiola grew up directly across the street at 5446. Jack Buck, the Cardinals broadcaster, lived on the same block in the late 1950s. Three baseball Hall of Famers within a hundred feet of one another. There is no other street in America like it.
Where The Hill Italians Came From
The Hill is unusual among American Italian neighbourhoods in that it drew from both ends of the peninsula. Most Little Italys in the United States are essentially southern: Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Naples. The Hill had a substantial northern contingent first, and the southerners came second.
The Lombard core came overwhelmingly from a handful of villages in the Po Valley, west of Milan. Cuggiono was the largest single source and remains, today, in regular contact with The Hill through cultural exchanges run by the Museo Cuggiono. Bareggio, Inveruno, Castano Primo, and the surrounding towns of the Lombardy plain sent hundreds of families to the same five streets.
The Sicilian wave that followed came largely from the interior of the island, from the province of Caltanissetta, from Cianciana in Agrigento, and from a scatter of mountain villages where the sulphur mines had closed and the land was exhausted. The two streams arrived twenty years apart, learned to share a parish, and within two generations had begun to marry across the old line.
The Hill Today
The neighbourhood, as of the 2020 census, holds about 2,500 residents, and roughly a quarter still claim Italian ancestry. The percentage has been falling for decades. New construction has brought in younger arrivals who came for the restaurants and stayed for the brick bungalows. The fire hydrants are still painted red, white, and green.
What has not changed is the texture. The bakeries are still bakeries. Missouri Baking on Edwards Street has been open since 1924, and the line for almond cookies on a Saturday morning still snakes onto the pavement. The bocce courts still fill up on Tuesday nights. The Italian Heritage Parade and Festa, run by the neighbourhood committee, still kicks off on the Sunday before Columbus Day with a procession down Marconi that has changed almost nothing about itself since the 1960s.
Whether The Hill is fading or simply ageing is a question the neighbourhood itself has stopped trying to answer. Most American Little Italys are gone, swallowed by gentrification or simply emptied by time. The Hill is smaller than it was, but it is still the place. The grandchildren of the men who came up from Cuggiono in 1882 still walk into St. Ambrose for the eight o’clock Mass. Someone still lights the candle. Someone still rolls the bocce ball down the same packed clay. The story has not ended. It has just moved into a slightly later chapter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle on The Hill?
Italians settled on The Hill in the 1880s and 1890s to work the Cheltenham clay mines and the brickyards that supplied St. Louis after the 1849 downtown fire required brick construction. The first arrivals were Lombards from the village of Cuggiono, near Milan, who came for the steady wages and then sent word home for their cousins and brothers to follow.
Is The Hill still Italian today?
The Hill remains the most concentrated Italian-American neighbourhood in the United States, although the share of residents claiming Italian ancestry has fallen from over ninety percent at peak to around twenty-seven percent in the 2020 census. The cultural institutions, restaurants, parish, and bocce clubs are still active, and the fire hydrants are still painted in the colours of the Italian flag.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks on The Hill?
St. Ambrose Catholic Church on Wilson Avenue, with the Italian Immigrants statue by Rudolph Torrini on its lawn, is the spiritual landmark. The restaurants Charlie Gitto’s, Rigazzi’s, Cunetto House of Pasta, Adriana’s, and Mama’s on The Hill are the culinary anchors. Hall of Fame Place, the 5400 block of Elizabeth Avenue where Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola grew up across the street from each other, is the sentimental one.
Where in Italy did The Hill Italians come from?
The Hill is unusual for drawing from both northern and southern Italy. The Lombard core came from villages in the Po Valley west of Milan, especially Cuggiono, Bareggio, Inveruno, and Castano Primo. The Sicilian wave arrived later, from the province of Caltanissetta and from villages including Cianciana, San Cataldo, and Mussomeli.
When did Italians first arrive on The Hill?
The first Italian immigrants arrived in the early 1880s to work the Cheltenham clay mines and the brick and tile factories that supplied a city rebuilding in brick after the 1849 fire. The community grew rapidly through chain migration, and by 1907 the parish of St. Ambrose counted over 3,000 Italian residents on what was then known as Fairmount Hill.
If your family’s story passed through The Hill, or any of the other places the Italians made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in the Lombardy plain or the Caltanissetta highlands to a brick bungalow on Elizabeth Avenue, to wherever you are reading this now.