Bella Vista

The Abruzzese Foundation

When the first Italian immigrants began arriving in Philadelphia in significant numbers in the 1880s and 1890s, they settled primarily in Bella Vista — then known simply as the southern edge of South Philadelphia. The largest single regional group came from Abruzzo, the mountainous central Italian region that sent more immigrants to Philadelphia than any other. By 1900, there were more people from Abruzzo on certain Bella Vista blocks than in some Abruzzese villages themselves.

The Abruzzese brought with them a particular food culture — the simple, robust cooking of the central Apennines, where pasta was made fresh from hard wheat and every family kept a kitchen garden and a few animals. In Bella Vista, this translated into the street market that would eventually become the 9th Street Italian Market: vendors selling vegetables, cheese, olive oil, and fresh pasta from pushcarts and stalls that had their origins in the weekly markets of Lanciano and Sulmona and Pescara.

The founding families of Bella Vista's Italian community came disproportionately from a handful of Abruzzese towns. Montenerodomo, a village in the Sangro valley, sent so many immigrants to South Philadelphia that it was said the village was functionally located on two continents. Families from Fara San Martino, Castel di Sangro, and Villa Santa Maria — towns in the mountain interior — built the first Italian Catholic parishes and established the commercial networks that made Bella Vista's Italian economy function.

The 9th Street Italian Market: America's Oldest

The Italian Market on 9th Street between Wharton and Federal Streets is the oldest continuously operating outdoor market in the United States — and it began in Bella Vista, not in the broader South Philadelphia area that later absorbed it. The market grew organically from the pushcart vendors who began operating in the late 1880s, establishing fixed positions on 9th Street and gradually extending the market's reach block by block.

The market's golden era was roughly 1900 to 1950, when the stalls were almost entirely run by Italian immigrant families and the product range reflected the specific regional origins of Bella Vista's population. Abruzzese cheeses, Sicilian citrus, Neapolitan pastry, Calabrian sausage — the market was a map of Southern Italy spread across eight blocks of a Philadelphia street.

The anchor institution was Di Bruno Bros, established by Danny and Joe Di Bruno in 1939 at 930 South 9th Street. The Di Bruno brothers came from Abruzzo, and their shop — initially a small cheese and provisions store — became the definitive expression of Italian food culture in Philadelphia. Today Di Bruno Bros has multiple locations across the city and a national reputation, but its origins are inseparable from the Bella Vista community that produced it.

Other market institutions with deep roots in the Bella Vista immigrant community include Fante's Kitchen Wares Shop (opened 1906 at 1006 South 9th Street), one of the oldest kitchen supply stores in America; Isgro Pastries (established 1904), whose ricotta-filled cannoli have been made by the same family for four generations; and D'Angelo Bros., butchers on 9th Street since 1970 but rooted in a family tradition that goes back to the turn of the century.

The Parish Network

The Catholic parishes of Bella Vista were among the most densely populated in the American diocese. St. Paul's Parish on Christian Street, established in 1843, was the oldest Catholic parish in South Philadelphia and initially served a mixed Irish and German immigrant community. As Italian immigration accelerated in the 1890s, the parish became predominantly Italian in character — though not without tensions, since Irish-American priests and Italian immigrants often had deeply different expectations of how a Catholic parish should operate.

The solution in many American cities was the national parish — a Catholic congregation organised by ethnic group rather than geography. In Philadelphia, the Italian community obtained St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi Church on Montrose Street, one of the first Italian national parishes in America, established in 1852 and rebuilt in more elaborate form as the Italian population grew. The church became the spiritual centre of the Abruzzese community in Bella Vista, hosting the elaborate festa celebrations — the feast of the patron saint — that were the single most important communal events in the Italian immigrant calendar.

These feste were not merely religious events. They were the occasions when the regional identities of Italian immigration were performed publicly — when Montenerodomo families marched behind the statue of their village's patron, when the women of the Fara San Martino families cooked the specific dishes of their home region, when the boundaries of community were redrawn and reaffirmed. Philadelphia's annual Italian festivals still carry the DNA of these Bella Vista parish feste, though few participants today know the Abruzzese or Sicilian origins of the celebrations.

The Sicilian Presence

Alongside the Abruzzese, the other major Italian regional community in Bella Vista came from Sicily — particularly from Palermo and the western Sicilian towns of Trapani and Marsala. Sicilian immigration to Philadelphia peaked in the 1900s and 1910s, and the Sicilian community settled in a distinct cluster within Bella Vista, centred on the blocks around 8th and Carpenter Streets.

The Sicilians brought different food traditions from the Abruzzese — the citrus culture of the Palermo plain, the preserved fish traditions of the western coast, the street food culture of Palermo's Ballarò market. These mingled and competed with Abruzzese traditions on the 9th Street market stalls, producing the hybrid Italian-American food culture that Philadelphia eventually claimed as its own.

Sicilian family names — Falcone, Ricci, Vitale, Zito — appear repeatedly in the Bella Vista parish and census records of the early 20th century. Several of the most prominent families in the 9th Street market's commercial history were Sicilian. The Anastasi family, whose seafood enterprise at the Italian Market eventually grew into one of Philadelphia's major restaurant groups, came from western Sicily.

Bella Vista Today

Bella Vista has gentrified substantially in the past two decades. The neighbourhood now attracts young professionals drawn by its proximity to Center City and its streetscape of intact 19th-century rowhouses. Italian-American families who were the third and fourth generation of Bella Vista's immigrant community mostly departed for the South Philadelphia suburbs — Ardmore, Norristown, the Main Line — in the post-war era.

The Italian Market survives, though it has diversified significantly. Mexican and Vietnamese vendors now operate alongside the Italian family businesses, and the market's character reflects the broader immigration history of South Philadelphia since the 1980s. Some of the anchor institutions remain: Di Bruno Bros, Fante's, the pastry shops, a handful of the original produce vendors whose families have occupied the same stalls for three and four generations.

For Italian-Americans across the country — the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those Abruzzese and Sicilian immigrants who built their lives in Bella Vista — the 9th Street market remains a kind of secular pilgrimage destination. To walk those eight blocks is to be in physical contact with the world those families made from nothing: the stalls, the smells, the sounds of vendors calling out in the accents of southern Italy transplanted to the streets of Philadelphia.