The Italian Market · The Abruzzesi · Rocky · The Mummers
Heritage guide for Italian-American descendants
| Location | South of South Street, between Broad Street and the Delaware River |
| Italian presence | 1880s to present — over 140 years of continuous Italian-American community |
| Peak period | 1910s–1960s — the era of the open-air market, the parish churches, and the entertainment industry |
| Regional origins | Primarily Abruzzo (Pescara and Chieti provinces), Sicily, Campania, and Calabria |
| Known for | The Italian Market (9th Street); Rocky (filmed here); famous sons Mario Lanza and Eddie Fisher; the Mummers Parade; Di Bruno Bros, Fante's, Talluto's, Claudio's |
| Today | Still significantly Italian-American with an active Italian Market, though increasingly diverse with Mexican, Vietnamese, and other immigrant communities |
The Italian story of South Philadelphia is, more precisely, the Abruzzese story — and this makes it unusual among major American cities. Where New York's Italian communities were predominantly Sicilian and Neapolitan, and Chicago's were Sicilian and Calabrian, South Philadelphia drew the majority of its Italian population from Abruzzo, the mountainous region on the eastern Adriatic slope of the Apennines. This regional particularity was not accidental. Chain migration — the pattern in which one immigrant from a specific village sends for family and fellow villagers, who in turn send for more — concentrated emigrants from the Pescara and Chieti provinces of Abruzzo in the streets south of South Street with a specificity that astonishes researchers today. Blocks could be traced back to single villages. Mutual aid societies bore the names of towns that barely existed on a map: the San Valentino in Abruzzo Society, the Castiglione Messer Marino Association.
The Abruzzesi who came to South Philadelphia were not, for the most part, the very poorest of Italy's southern poor. Abruzzo was rugged and the land was difficult, but the region had traditions of skilled craft work, shepherding, and small-scale commerce that gave its emigrants a certain practical resourcefulness. They arrived in Philadelphia — primarily through the port — from the 1880s onward, finding cheap housing in the grid of rowhouses south of Washington Avenue. Within a generation, many had moved from day labour into food vending, small commerce, and the skilled trades.
The Abruzzese food tradition they brought to South Philadelphia was distinct from what non-Italian Americans associated with "Italian food." The cuisine of Abruzzo is peasant food of the mountains and the Adriatic coast: arrosticini (grilled lamb skewers), pasta alla chitarra (square-cut egg pasta), brodetto (Adriatic fish stew), confetti di Sulmona (sugar-coated almonds). This was not the tomato-sauce-heavy cooking of Naples or Sicily. In South Philadelphia's Italian households, the food remained recognisably Abruzzese for generations — and the culinary traditions of the Italian Market reflect this, even today, in the cheeses, the cured meats, and the specialty items that the older vendors stock.
The Italian Market on 9th Street is the oldest and largest outdoor market in the United States, operating continuously since the late 1880s, and it is the living centre of Italian South Philadelphia's identity. It did not begin as an Italian institution. The street vendors who first occupied the blocks of 9th Street between Christian and Washington Avenue were of mixed immigrant background — Jewish, Irish, German — selling produce, fish, and dry goods from pushcarts to the dense working-class population of the surrounding streets. As the Italian population of South Philadelphia expanded through the 1890s and 1900s, Italian vendors came to dominate the street, and by the early twentieth century "the Italian Market" was both the official and the natural name for what 9th Street had become.
The specific businesses that defined the Italian Market in its twentieth-century prime were family operations of extraordinary longevity. Di Bruno Bros., founded in 1939 by brothers Danny and Joe Di Bruno — emigrants from Abruzzo via the same chain migration that brought most of South Philly's Italian population — became the most famous Italian cheese and provisions shop in Philadelphia, a destination for the city's food lovers and an institution that expanded through the late twentieth century without losing its South Philly identity. Claudio's, a cheese and specialty foods shop whose roots go back to the early twentieth century, maintained a continuity of family ownership that spanned nearly a hundred years. Talluto's, the homemade pasta shop, and Fante's Kitchen Wares — one of the oldest cookware shops in the country, supplying the professional kitchens and home cooks of the city since 1906 — completed the core of a market that was as much cultural pilgrimage as shopping destination.
Walking 9th Street on a Saturday morning in the market's peak decades was an experience of sensory density that visitors from outside South Philadelphia found overwhelming. Open stalls spread onto the pavement with produce, live fish in tanks, hanging cheeses, slabs of cured meat. Vendors called in Italian and English. The smell of roasting coffee from Spasso blended with the fishmonger's stall. Families shopped in a weekly ritual that was as much about social contact — seeing neighbours, exchanging news, maintaining the web of community obligation — as about the actual purchase of food. The market was a neighbourhood commons, and its rhythms structured the week.
When Sylvester Stallone wrote and starred in Rocky in 1976, he was doing something more precise than making a boxing film. He was constructing a mythology of Italian-American working-class dignity using South Philadelphia as both setting and symbol. The choice was not arbitrary. Stallone himself had roots in the neighbourhood — his Italian grandmother had lived in South Philly, and he had spent time in the streets around the Italian Market. When the film placed its protagonist in the rowhouses, corner gyms, and cobblestone streets of South Philadelphia, it was drawing on a real geography of a real community to tell a story that Italian-Americans across the country recognised as theirs.
The Rocky films — particularly the first and third — gave South Philadelphia an international cultural visibility that it had never quite had before, and which proved unexpectedly durable. The Rocky statue, cast in bronze by sculptor A. Thomas Schomberg and originally created as a prop for Rocky III in 1982, has had a complicated relationship with the city's cultural establishment — it was removed from the Art Museum steps, relocated to the Spectrum sports complex, and eventually returned to the museum area, where it sits at the bottom of the steps now known to millions as "the Rocky steps." For Italian South Philadelphia, the statue is not merely a film souvenir. It is a monument to the idea that a community of immigrant labourers and their descendants produced something worth celebrating.
South Philadelphia's tradition of producing popular entertainers predates Rocky by decades. Mario Lanza — born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza in 1921 on Christian Street, the son of Abruzzese immigrants — became one of the most celebrated operatic tenors of the twentieth century, his recordings selling millions worldwide and his film career making him famous in countries his grandparents had never heard of. Eddie Fisher, born Edwin Jack Fisher in 1928 to a family from the Pale of Settlement via South Philly, became one of the best-selling recording artists of the 1950s. The neighbourhood that produced Lanza and Fisher — and later, in different registers, Chubby Checker, Fabian, and Frankie Avalon — had something about it that kept generating performers. Whether it was the density of the community, the particular mixing of cultures at the Italian Market, or some other quality is a question that South Philly historians have been asking for decades without a definitive answer.
The Philadelphia Mummers Parade is the oldest folk parade in the United States, tracing its roots to the informal New Year's Day mumming traditions that European immigrants of many backgrounds brought to Philadelphia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the late nineteenth century, what had been a loose collection of neighbourhood celebrations was consolidating into organised clubs and string bands, and the parade received official city recognition and a prize structure in 1901. The Mummers tradition was not originally Italian — its early organisational core was primarily working-class Irish, German, and Swedish — but Italian-American South Philadelphia adopted it with an enthusiasm that eventually made Italian heritage central to the parade's character.
The string bands, which are the most musically complex element of the Mummers tradition, drew heavily on South Philadelphia's Italian musical culture. Families with backgrounds in Old World music — the mandolin and guitar traditions of Abruzzo and Sicily, the brass band culture of southern Italian towns — found in the string band competition a natural home for skills that had limited application in the rowhouse streets of South Philly. The elaborate costumes, the competition between clubs for prizes, the fierce neighbourhood loyalties that the clubs embodied — all of these mapped naturally onto the Italian-American community's existing structures of mutual aid, social clubs, and territorial pride.
The specific clubs associated with Italian South Philadelphia — the Ferko String Band, the Avalon String Band, the South Philadelphia String Band — became institutions whose histories tracked the Italian community's own trajectory: founded in the early twentieth century by first- and second-generation immigrants, reaching their competitive peak in the mid-century decades, and evolving (with varying degrees of success) as the neighbourhood's demographic composition changed. The Mummers Parade today remains one of the few civic traditions in Philadelphia that visibly connects the city's Italian-American past to its present — even as much of what was Italian about South Philadelphia has been transformed by time, suburban movement, and the arrival of new immigrant communities.
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