The story of Little Italy’s Feast of San Gennaro is the story of how Italian immigrants became American

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Clare Whitton, University of Oxford

(THE CONVERSATION) For two weeks in September, everyone wants to be Italian – at least judging by the crowds at the annual Feast of San Gennaro in New York City’s Little Italy.

Founded in 1926, the largest and longest-running Italian festival in the United States celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, with locals and tourists alike descending upon Mulberry Street in Manhattan to celebrate Italian American culture.

To be sure, there’s plenty that’s commercialized: Frank Sinatra impersonators croon “New York, New York,” while vendors hawk shirts with quotes from “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos” at astronomical prices. Classic Italian American fare like chicken parm subs and sausage and peppers fly off food carts.

And yet in my work as a medievalist, I’ve explored how this festival champions traditions that go back thousands of years.

If anything, the fact that centuries-old rituals coexist with sweet Italian sausages and big, floppy pizza slices speaks to a lengthy, strenuous and beautiful process of cultural assimilation.

From the Bay of Naples to Little Italy

Between 1881 and 1920, over 4.5 million Italians immigrated to America. Thousands, most of whom hailed from southern Italy, settled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to form what became Little Italy.

These “huddled masses” faced all sorts of difficulties: overcrowded tenements, trouble finding work, racial discrimination and suspicion of their southern Italian Catholic practices, particularly from Irish Catholics. The Italian procession of religious statues and the street parties that followed, the Irish argued, looked far too pagan and idolatrous to be considered “real” Catholicism. Irish suspicion of such practices were also shared by local Protestants.

But by the early 20th century, Italian communities had grown so large that they could fund their own Italian-speaking churches.

One such parish was the Church of the Most Precious Blood, built in 1904 on Baxter Street. In 1926, a group of parishioners led by Alexander Tisi organized a tribute to one of the most popular holy figures from southern Italy: St. Januarius, known in Italian as San Gennaro.

An early Christian bishop, Gennaro was brutally beheaded outside of Naples on Sept. 19 in AD 305 on account of his faith. His execution was one of several that took place during the Diocletian Persecutions, a systematic campaign against Christians by the Roman Empire.

Since then, southern Italians have attributed all sorts of miracles to his intercession, including extinguishing the volcanic fires of Mount Vesuvius in 1631.

He is also seen as something of a prophet. Since at least 1389, two vials purportedly containing the saint’s blood have been venerated in Naples because of their inexplicable ability to liquefy on his feast days. The liquefaction has long been interpreted as a sign of the saint’s protection. On the other hand, Italians viewed the blood staying solid as the sign of a looming catastrophe. The Allied bombings of Naples in 1943, for example, occurred after the blood failed to liquefy.

Since the later Middle Ages, Gennaro’s feast on Sept. 19 has been one of the most important dates on Naples’ calendar.

During medieval and Renaissance celebrations, pork was the meal of choice, with pigs often awarded to the winners of street games. Young men might wrestle a greased-up pig inside the Naples Cathedral, with the victor cooking the animal for supper.

The road to cultural assimilation

Centuries of devotion transformed San Gennaro into a symbol of Neapolitan identity. New York’s festival was designed to preserve those traditions.

That first Feast of San Gennaro in 1926 gave Italian immigrants a rare opportunity to publicly profess the cultural identity they had left behind in Italy.

It began with a procession featuring a 3-foot statue of San Gennaro. Hoisted upon men’s shoulders, the saint traveled around the church and the surrounding streets. While en route, devotees tacked dollar bills to his body, as many still do today. There was no blood relic, but there was a purported bone fragment of Gennaro’s specifically donated for the occasion. The chip of bone was placed in a circular container called a reliquary and hung around the saint’s neck. Afterward, the Italians of Little Italy gathered around plates of roasted chicken to toast to their shared heritage and traditions.

The event was a big success. Just two years later, in 1928, The New York Times reported that thousands of ex-Neapolitans were congregating for a festival that had already extended from one day to a full week.

But with triumph came trouble. That same year, New York Police Commissioner Joseph Warren prohibited the procession, arguing that the dollar bills pinned to the statue represented the “profanation of sacred religious symbols.” The decision was ultimately reversed by a New York Supreme Court judge, on the grounds that Warren violated the populace’s religious liberties.

Warren’s attempt to suppress the procession exemplifies the sort of religious prejudices plaguing Italian communities during that period. But it was not the only form of discrimination Italians faced.

The darkness of southern Italians’ skin subjected them to discrimination, birthing derogatory slurs like “guinea” or “swarthy.” The suspicion that Italian immigrants were prone to criminal behavior was reinforced by real mafia organizations, such as the infamous Black Hand.

These prejudices, combined with the establishment of Italian churches and feasts, led to the belief that Italian immigrants clung too strongly to the traditions of their homeland and refused to assimilate into American culture.

Non-Italians join the party

It was not until after World War II that outsiders no longer hesitated to participate in Italian culture and festivities.

In 1949, local newspapers reported that thousands of people of various ethnic backgrounds attended the riotous feast, where they watched Italians dance to folk songs in the streets and symphonic bands parade through the neighborhood beneath a new innovation: colored string lights casting pops of green, white and red along the city streets. Food played a big role: Stalls piled high with fresh clams, pasta and pastries promised non-Italians an authentic taste of Italy.

From there, attendance ballooned. In the 1960s, chartered buses ushered in Italians from states as far away as Maine and Ohio. By the 1970s, the feast had some 3 million visitors a year. Many locals today still recall how, in the 1960s and 1970s, young men climbed greased-up steel poles set out in the street in hopes of claiming a cash prize. The oily affair was squashed over safety concerns in the 1980s.

Over the years, the feast has faced its own challenges from within the Italian community.

In 2007, some inhabitants of Little Italy petitioned Mayor Michael Bloomberg to cancel the festival, citing the strain that tourists placed on the local neighborhood and mafia interference. In 1996, for example, 19 members of the Genovese crime family were arrested for gambling, collecting dues from vendors and even stealing money off Gennaro’s statue.

Nevertheless, Bloomberg declined to interfere. The event, he said, was a part of New York itself.

No one understands this more than the organizers of this year’s feast. When discussing the plans for 2026, the committee declared that this event was not just an Italian festival, but a tribute to New York’s cultural melting pot.

The 100th festival is dedicated to the Italian Americans who contributed to the city’s birth, an honor that arrives at a moment of controversy. Two months prior, Mayor Zohran Mamdani omitted Little Italy from a map of the city’s immigrant enclaves, sparking immediate backlash. While Mamdani vowed to reinsert the neighborhood, some argued that the omission accurately reflected the dwindling number of Italians living along Mulberry Street.

The controversy underscores the question fueling the centenary: How should the immigrants who built the city of New York be honored, even as the descendants of many of those immigrants have left their old neighborhoods for different parts of the country?

Perhaps the answer is this year’s grand marshal, San Gennaro himself, who continues to serve as a bridge between the children of the Italian diaspora and their forefathers, just as he did in 1926.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-little-italys-feast-of-san-gennaro-is-the-story-of-how-italian-immigrants-became-american-291237.