Watching mosaic artist Matteo Randi bend over his work is a revelation. First of all, there’s the sound, that unmistakable chink of chisel on stone. Then there are the tiles, or tessera, cut by hand, not a machine. Finally, there is the painstaking process of piecing it all together in a design that melds tradition, inspiration and faith.
“I like to remember that I do it the same way that people have been doing it for centuries,” says Mr. Randi, who began working with mosaics when he was just 11.
Mr. Randi will be demonstrating the art of the mosaicista, the mosaic maker, at this year’s Festa Italiana, which brings together the fruits of Italian and Italian American cooking, culture and craftsmanship.
Sunday’s celebration starts at 11:30 a.m. in front of Holy Rosary Church in Northwest. Since 1913 the church has been the mortar that has helped to hold Washington’s Italian community together despite migrations, suburbanization and urban renewal.
Now, as the neighborhood around the church revives, the Festa has become a chance to show off the mosaic of lifestyles and experiences that together make up the Italian community of Greater Washington.
The Festa, sponsored by the nonprofit Festa Italiana Foundation, will showcase various decorative arts traditionally associated with Italian artisans, along with food, music, dancing and much more. You can even learn Briscola, the Italian card game that was featured at the Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival in 2000.
“It’s an echo of home for us,” says Karen DiGiovanni, president of the D.C. chapter of Fieri, an organization of students and young professionals interested in promoting Italian culture. “It’s very comforting and familiar.”
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The Italian community in the Washington area may be smaller than those in Philadelphia or Baltimore, but its contributions stud the city like the candied fruits in a panettone.
Italian artisans left their mark in the Capitol, carved stones for the National Cathedral and installed mosaics in buildings throughout the city. Italian workers helped to build Union Station and many of the imposing federal buildings that help define the District’s landscape.
Italian musicians helped form the Marine Band, and one, Francis Scala, became its director in 1855. Scala, who served until 1871, brought the band with him when he accompanied Abraham Lincoln to Gettysburg for the dedication of the cemetery there.
Over the years, Italian-American grocers, bakers and restaurateurs helped transform the city’s eating tastes, while Italian-American professionals worked in business, medicine and the law.
One of the more famously skilled Italians to arrive in Washington was Constantino Brumidi, (1805-1880), who will be honored at this year’s Festa. The artist came to the United States from Rome in 1852 with an eye toward working on the Capitol building.
“My ambition is that I may live long enough to make beautiful the Capitol of the one country on Earth where there is liberty,” Brumidi supposedly remarked, although the story may be apocryphal.
Before he died, Brumidi did help make the Capitol more beautiful. In addition to his “Apotheosis of Washington” under the Capitol dome, he is responsible for many of the frescoes and oil paintings in the Senate wing.
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The Festa, which began in 1998, is hardly the first festival that has taken place under the auspices of Holy Rosary Church. From the very beginning, feast days, saints’ days and various “entertainments” were part of the lifeblood of the church, anchoring what would become a far-flung Italian community and outlasting what had once been a predominantly Italian neighborhood.
Inside, the church reflects both the pride and reverence of the Italian community, which contributed its hard-earned wages through special collections to raise the funds needed to decorate the church after the building was completed in 1923.
The bands of mosaic tiles on the floor are placed in green, white and red, reflecting the colors of the Italian flag. A bas-relief of Italian marble honors Cardinal Giovanni Vincenzo Bonzano, the apostolic delegate to the United States from 1912 to 1922, who helped to secure permission to build the church. And the 14 Stations of the Cross were created by Antonio Costaman’s mosaic studio in Venice.
Above the altar is a large painting of Our Lady of the Rosary by Italian artist Romano Fattorini after an earlier German work. Now carefully restored and preserved, its 1990 renovation revealed a curious circumstance.
“The cleaner found that someone had tried to change the color of the infant Jesus’ hair from blond to black,” says the Rev. Charles Zanoni, a member of the Scalabrini Fathers and Holy Rosary’s pastor. “I told him to take it back to the way it was supposed to be.”
Church records reveal the changes and challenges facing Washington’s Italian community over the years. Baptisms and marriages were plentiful in the years before World War II, but fell off parishioners began leaving for the suburbs. Recently, though, things have been taking a turn for the better.
“They’re building condos and apartments and the people are coming here,” says Father Zanoni. “And there are a lot of people from Italy who work in Washington who come here as well.”
They also may be coming to enjoy Casa Italiana, the Italian cultural center. The imposing 1981 building adjacent to Holy Rosary hosts both Italians and lovers of Italian culture for a wide range of Italian-related activities, including Mr. Randi’s mosaic classes. The Casa Italiana School provides Italian lessons for a variety of fluency levels; its popular Italian for Travelers classes also will be demonstrated during the Festa.
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In the 1890s, many Italian workers from the neighborhood helped to construct the Library of Congress, where mosaics from Italy form part of the aesthetic of the 1897 Thomas Jefferson Building, constructed in the American Renaissance style.
The art of the mosaic maker also can be seen in the 1899 Franciscan Monastery in Northeast, designed by Italian architect Aristide Leonori. Located in the Brookland neighborhood, the monastery contains a re-creation of important sites in the Holy Land and includes a reproduction of the catacombs in Rome.
Plans for the mosaics within the catacombs started before World War II, but it was only after that war that the mosaics were made in Italy and then shipped to the monastery. Outside are mosaics crafted by Charles Facchina, the monastery’s own mosaicista, who lived nearby.
By the time construction of Union Station began in 1903, Italian workers were beginning to outnumber their Irish counterparts in the neighborhood of Swampoodle, which surrounded the site. Union Station itself is based on Italian designs, and architect Daniel Burnham brought in both Italian artisans and unskilled workers for the project.
As Swampoodle grew more Italian in character, various establishments sprang up to serve the residents. In succeeding years, Italians scattered throughout the city, with enclaves along North Capitol Street, on Georgia Avenue and in Brookland. A handful of their institutions remain.
A. Litteri, now on Morse Street NE, got its start in 1926 at Sixth and G streets NW, says Donald Ricciardella, a longtime customer who has been coming in to help out for years.
“There were two brothers-in-law who emigrated from Sicily,” he says. “They moved to Morse Street in 1932.”
The grandson of one of those brothers-in-law, Michael DeFrancisi, now manages the store.
Tucked away between a string of wholesalers and the D.C. Farmer’s Market, Litteri is an unexpected snatch of sights, smells and, of course, tastes. The colors on those cans of tomatoes and olives seem brighter, somehow, than those in a grocery store. That slightly sharp odor of cheese that greets you when you walk in is hardly the stuff of the neatly wrapped supermarket packages.
Need salted codfish? Litteri stocks it. It also has a range of balsamic vinegars, hard to find Italian wines, and homemade Italian sausage using an old family recipe.
“We’ve got the best homemade sausage in the metro area,” Mr. Ricciardella says. “People come in from the suburbs just to get it.”
Today, Amtrak employees and office workers from the up-and-coming New York Avenue corridor maneuver past Italian-Americans in from the suburbs for their weekly fix of ingredients.
Subs are a relatively new innovation here at Litteri, which only started making them a few years ago. But thanks to homemade sausage and some outstanding bread, the decades-old institution has a hit on its hands.
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Litteri gets its bread from Catania Bakery, another old Washington institution. So do Lauriol Plaza, the Washington Palm and the Pines of Rome, among many other Washington-area restaurants.
Located at 1400 North Capitol St. in what was once another Italian pocket, the bakery — named for the Catania region of Sicily — began in 1932 after Alfio and Mario Caruso came down from Connecticut with their recipe for old-fashioned Sicilian bread: rich, chewy and packed with a lot more flavor than the supermarket variety.
“We keep it exactly the same,” says Nicole Tramonte, who bought the bakery from the Caruso family in 1978. “We use the best flour; we use the same recipe; and we don’t use automatic cutters.”
Louie Caruso, 91, a son of the original owners, still comes by the shop nearly every day to make sure.
Mrs. Tramonte is from the south of France; her husband Anthony, an Italian-American dentist, remembered coming to the bakery late at night for freshly made bread when he was at Georgetown University School of Dentistry in the 1940s.
During the 1968 riots, Mr. Caruso and his sister Grace, who died two months ago, lived upstairs in the apartment over the bakery. The place was untouched.
“We’re a bit of an island here,” Mrs. Tramonte says. “People seem to respect that we’ve been here so long and stayed.”
Longtime customers swear by Tramonte’s Italian bread, still baked in the Middleby Marshall oven the Carusos acquired back in 1948. There are crusty rolls and mini-rolls, too.
“My husband says they still have the best bread,” says Ada DiValentin, from McLean, who has been coming to the bakery for the last 40 years. “He thinks it’s even better than the bread in Italy.”
On Saturday mornings, there’s a special treat: Tramonte’s croissants — some plain, some filled, all with that crusty outside that Catania customers enjoy.
“They’re just so good,” says Yasmine Saibou, a neighborhood resident who stops by nearly every Saturday. “I really look forward to this.”
Because you don’t have to be from Italy to enjoy all things Italian. You just have to know where to find them.
Drop by festival, other sites
Festa Italiana takes place Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Third and F streets NW. Sample Italian food and wine, listen to an Italian-American band (via New Orleans) and try your luck at winning a Vespa or other prizes in the annual raffle.
Children’s activities include face painters and mask makers. Grownups can take an “Italian for travelers” class, play bocce and buy authentic Italian crafts, including Murano glass. The Briscola game starts at 1:30 p.m., and Matteo Randi will demonstrate mosaic making at 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. For more information, see www.festaitalianadc.com.
If you can’t make Festa Italiana this year, head for Baltimore, where the Little Italy Open Air Film Festival runs every Friday in July and August at the intersection of High and Stiles streets. Entertainment begins at 7 p.m. and the Italian-themed movie starts at 9 p.m.
To explore the hub of Washington’s Italian culture on your own, check out these places mentioned in the story:
• A. Litteri: 517-519 Morse St. NE. Open 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday. Closed Sunday and Monday. 202/544-0184 or www.litteris.com.
• Casa Italiana Cultural Center: 595½ Third St. NW. The summer session comes to an end on Sunday, but classes resume in the fall. Call 202/638-0165 or see www.CasaItalianaSchool.org.
• Catania Bakery: 1400 N. Capitol St. NW. 7 a.m.-noon Tuesday-Saturday. You’ll find owner Nicole Tramonte there on Saturday mornings. Take note: if you want to try some of her crusty croissants, you’ll have to get there before 9 a.m. They sell out early. 202/332-5135 or www.cataniabakery.com.
• Franciscan Monastery: 1400 Quincy St. NE. Tours of the church and catacombs 9-11 a.m. and 1-4 p.m. Monday-Saturday on the hour, and 1-4 p.m. Sunday on the hour. 202/526-6800 or www.myfranciscan.com.
• Holy Rosary Church: 595 Third St. NW. Sunday Mass at 9 a.m. and noon in English and at 10:30 a.m. in Italian. 202/638-0165.
• The Library of Congress: 101 Independence Ave. SE. Public tours 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. and 1:30, 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. Monday-Friday and 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. Saturday in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building. Visitor Information 202/707-8000 or see www.loc.gov.
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