Sicilian Settlement · The French Market · A City Within a City
How Sicilian immigrants built a community in New Orleans — and why their story changed America
| Period of Settlement | 1880s–1920s |
| Primary Origins | Western Sicily (Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento, Messina) |
| Neighbourhood | Decatur Street, French Market, 1st and 2nd Wards |
| Occupations | Fruit vendors, stevedores, oyster dealers, grocers |
| Key Event | 1891 lynching — 11 Italian immigrants killed by mob |
| Legacy | Central Grocery (muffuletta), French Market vendors, Louisiana food culture |
New Orleans received Sicilian immigrants decades before Ellis Island became the main entry point for European arrivals. The port of New Orleans was the second largest point of entry for immigrants in America, and from the 1870s onward, ships from Palermo, Messina, and the ports of western Sicily docked regularly at the city's levees. The Sicilians who disembarked found a city that was, in many ways, more recognisable to them than New York would have been.
New Orleans was a Mediterranean city. The food, the climate, the Catholic culture, the emphasis on family, the markets where vendors sold fresh produce from carts — all of this resembled, imperfectly but recognisably, what the immigrants had left. The French Quarter's balconied buildings looked enough like the balconied streets of Palermo that more than one immigrant is recorded as saying they felt less far from home than expected.
The Sicilians clustered around the French Market, the oldest public market in the United States, where they quickly established themselves as produce vendors, oyster dealers, and fishmongers. By 1890, Italian immigrants dominated the market's fruit and vegetable stalls so completely that the area around Decatur Street, Magazine Street, and the riverfront had acquired a new name: Little Palermo.
The 1891 lynching is the event that made New Orleans's Italian community nationally known, though not in the way any community would choose. In October 1890, Police Chief David Hennessy was shot and killed in the street. In the atmosphere of the time — one in which Italian immigrants were assumed to be connected to organised crime by their very ethnicity — nineteen Italian men were arrested and charged. Nine were tried; six were acquitted and the jury deadlocked on three others.
On March 14, 1891, a mob of several thousand men forced their way into the jail and murdered eleven of the Italian prisoners — nine Sicilians and two from other Italian regions. It remains the largest mass lynching in American history. The Italian government recalled its ambassador; diplomatic relations between the United States and Italy were briefly severed. Three of the victims were Italian citizens, and the incident prompted the first serious diplomatic crisis over the treatment of Italian immigrants in America.
The long-term consequence was an acceleration of the Sicilian immigration to Louisiana and an increase in federal attention to the treatment of immigrants. The Italian community of New Orleans did not diminish after 1891 — it grew. By 1910, the city had one of the largest Italian populations in the South, concentrated in the First and Second Wards and extending along the lakefront.
The food legacy of New Orleans's Sicilian community is permanent. The muffuletta sandwich — the city's most distinctive culinary contribution after the po'boy — was invented in 1906 at the Central Grocery on Decatur Street, opened by a Sicilian immigrant named Salvatore Lupo. The sandwich, with its olive salad and its round Sicilian bread, was designed for the market workers who couldn't eat lunch with both hands occupied. It is still sold from the same building today.
29,000 readers follow Love Italy for the real Italy — the regional cultures, the surnames, and the food traditions that New Orleans's Sicilian descendants came from. From Palermo's street markets to the Marsala vineyards of western Sicily.
Subscribe to Love Italy →The Italian-Americans of Louisiana dispersed across the Gulf South over the 20th century — to Baton Rouge, to the New Orleans suburbs, to Houston and Dallas. Many moved into the Louisiana sugar and citrus industries where Sicilian labour had been recruited since the 1880s. The surnames Brocato, Monteleone, Vaccaro, Cusimano, DiMaggio — these are the names of Louisiana Italian families, descended from the Sicilian immigrants who came through the port of New Orleans.
Love Italy — the newsletter followed by 29,000 readers across North America and beyond — exists partly for this community: Italians at several removes from their ancestral towns, connected to Sicily and Calabria and Campania through food, surname, and family story rather than through direct memory.