Little Italy, Baltimore's Italian American neighborhood, wraps you in a compact enclave of rowhouses, restaurants, and Catholic churches that has maintained its cultural identity for over 150 years. Italian immigrants began arriving in Baltimore in significant numbers in the 1840s, settling near the harbor between the Jewish neighborhood to the west and the Polish waterfront to the east. The neighborhood's population peaked in the early twentieth century, when Italian-born residents and their children filled the rowhouses, fishmonger stalls, and produce markets of High Street.
The community built Saint Leo's Catholic Church, established Italian-language schools, and created a dense web of mutual aid societies and social clubs. Little Italy was famous for its outdoor movies shown in the parking lot on summer evenings, its feast days celebrated with processions down High Street, and its bocce court where old men played through the afternoons. The restaurants that line Fawn Street became Baltimore's destination for Italian cuisine, drawing diners from across the region for homemade pasta, veal, and the specific style of Italian American cooking that developed in the immigrant neighborhoods of the Northeast.
The neighborhood contracted as the postwar generation moved to the suburbs but the restaurants held on, and the neighborhood maintains a strong identity even as its resident Italian population has declined. Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, was born in the neighborhood — her father was a Baltimore congressman and later mayor.