Your walk enters Little Italy, the neighborhood that grew up in the 1920s around San Diego's Italian tuna fishing fleet and still thrives as one of the city's most vibrant districts. Italian immigrants — many from the Sicilian town of Isola delle Femmine — began arriving in San Diego in the late nineteenth century, drawn by fishing opportunities in the Pacific. By the 1920s, the San Diego tuna fleet was the largest in the world, and the canneries along the waterfront to the south processed millions of cans a year.
The fishermen and their families settled in this neighborhood just north of downtown, building Catholic churches, social clubs, bakeries, and the densely woven community institutions of immigrant urban life. World War II disrupted the community severely: Italian-born residents were classified as enemy aliens and some were interned or restricted in their movements. The postwar construction of the I-5 freeway through the neighborhood physically destroyed dozens of blocks of housing and businesses, shrinking Little Italy dramatically.
The neighborhood that exists today is partly a survival story and partly a reinvention — a genuine Italian-American community that has become one of San Diego's premier dining and entertainment districts.