Little Italy on College Street

Travel back with us to discover Toronto’s Little Italy, a community unbound by walls where city streets transform into vibrant piazzas.

Not long ago, walking down College Street you’d hear roosters in backyards and see caged rabbits on rooftops. Plump garlic hung on hooks of semi-detached Bay-and-Gable-style homes and front yards were dense with super-sized zucchini vines. Locals drank espresso under vibrant umbrellas at local shops, swapping the latest gossip in their mother tongues.

The College Street neighbourhood (bound by Shaw, Dundas, and Bathurst Streets) became the central hub for the growing Italian community in the city.

College Street is named for King’s College, a precursor to the University of Toronto. Around 1829, College Street was laid out as a spacious boulevard with mansions for the city’s elite, primarily Protestant British settlers.

Italians arrived in three waves: at the turn of the twentieth century, between the two world wars, and after the Second World War, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.

The first wave of Italian migration (c.1880s–1910s) brought newcomers who mostly settled in an area known as The Ward, near what is today’s Queen and Bay Streets. There, they mixed with Black Canadians, Jews from Eastern Europe, Chinese, and other recently arrived migrants.

By the 1900s, Toronto’s early Italians were already settling along the College Street stretch west of Bathurst. On Mansfield Street, Salvatore Turano established a grocery store, a boarding house, and a labour agency that would bring many of his fellow townspeople (paesani) to the neighbourhood.

Just around the corner from Turano’s home was the Venezia Hotel (where the Monarch Tavern stands today). The building was erected by Francesco Tomaiuolo, a very influential padrone, or labour broker. A private banker and steamship agent, Tomaiuolo also published one of the earlier Italian-language newspapers in the city.

By 1926, a survey of this stretch of College reported that more than 60% of the businesses were Italian. By 1931, the census claimed that 77% of Toronto’s Italians lived in the area. By the start of the Second World War, College Street was distinctly Italian in character.

During the Second World War, Italy’s Fascist government under Benito Mussolini was allied with the Nazis, and Italian Canadians were labelled “enemy aliens.”

When Italy declared war on Great Britain and France on June 10, 1940, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King labelled all Italian nationals (and even some Canadian-born people of Italian descent) as “enemy aliens” under Canada’s War Measures Act. This legislation gave the state huge powers to suspend civil liberties, monitor communities, and arrest suspects without trial. Italian Canadians had already faced decades of discrimination, including stereotypes of criminality. New suspicions about loyalty and fears of fascist influence led to the internment of around 600 Italian men and some women, and the surveillance of thousands more.

Italians could be dismissed from their jobs, denied work, and were subject to public and police harassment. This period had immediate and long-lasting effects on individuals, families, and the broader community.

To avoid suspicion, many Italian Canadians distanced themselves from their heritage. This legacy of silence and shame would only start to change with the massive postwar wave of migration that brought new Italian immigrants who felt more free to express their Italianitá (Italianness) publicly.

The postwar wave of immigrants had an enormous impact on the neighbourhood, changing the streetscape and building the village feel of College Street.

After the Second World War, Italy was devastated. At the same time, Canada experienced an economic boom, making it a popular destination for immigrants. Diplomatic relations between Italy and Canada resumed in 1947, and with that came a massive wave of migration made possible by a federal policy that included a family reunification program. New Canadians could sponsor their relatives as newcomers.

From 1947 until 1971, approximately 20,000 Italians arrived in Canada each year. Most newcomers initially found seasonal work. Men were often manual labourers (construction, maintenance of city roads, sewers, and more) while women took on piecemeal work from home or worked in the garment industry downtown.

For Italians, being frugal was an important strategic element of the family economy. To adapt to an urban environment, many turned to their agricultural skills and planted fruit and vegetable gardens to save on groceries. The practice of keeping gardens was widespread in the area, and sufficient garden space was often an important consideration when families had the means to buy a home.

Excerpt from poem by Gianna Patriarca

They cooked their pasta
by the light of a forty watt bulb
drank bad red wine
as they argued the politics of
the country they left behind
avoiding always the new politics.
late in the evenings they
spent their loose change
in the Gatto Nero, the Bar Italia
pool, espresso
cards and cigarettes.

For the full poem, listen to this reading by the poet below.

[View Audio Transcript]

The postwar Italian community found many ways to come together. Some entrepreneurial immigrants quickly set up businesses along College Street, providing goods and services such as barber shops, grocery stores, banks, and mutual aid groups.

Born in The Ward in 1915 to immigrant parents, Johnny Lombardi opened a grocery store at Dundas and Manning Streets and then used a radio program to advertise his grocery business. In 1966, with the help of his friend Ted Rogers, Lombardi launched CHIN, the first fully multilingual radio station in Ontario. By the 1970s, CHIN was broadcasting in over 30 languages. CHIN became a touchstone — not just for the Italian community, but for newcomer and immigrant communities across the Greater Toronto Area.

Festival Fine Foods (originally named Festival Gift & Variety) was established in the mid-1970s by Severino and Giovanna Manni at 649 College Street. Quickly after its opening, the store became a go-to for Italian grocery staples in the neighbourhood. The Manni family had entrepreneurial experience, having opened Severino’s barbershop a block east at Clinton Street in 1960, followed by a second barbershop just up the street a few years later.

Cafés and bars like Il Gatto Nero and Bar Italia became popular gathering places that served almost exclusively male clienteles. At College and Montrose Streets, four brothers — Natale, Aurelio, Francesco, and Giuseppe Galipo — established the Sicilian Sidewalk Café in 1959, known not just for gelato, but as a meeting point for new and established Italians.

One of the most notable landmarks of Toronto’s Little Italy is the famous Café Diplomatico (594 College Street). “The Dip,” as some locals call it, was established in 1968 at the height of Italian presence in the area by Rocco Mastrangelo, a local entrepreneur and the owner of many other local businesses. Café Diplomatico was notable in its early days because, like the Sicilian Sidewalk Café, it introduced espresso and café culture to the streets of Toronto. At the time, the patio with outdoor seating and big umbrellas was an oddity in buttoned-up Toronto. Many newcomers remember that simply standing on the street alongside other Italians was enough to rouse the attention of local police, who threatened to arrest anyone who didn’t split up and go home. A battle with City Hall eventually granted the Mastrangelos a liquor license for the Dip, and they later expanded the storefront and included a full kitchen. The Dip became yet another important meeting place, and an early pioneer of patio culture in the city.

Over time, Italians not only contributed to the city’s physical growth, but they also established unions, businesses, and community networks that improved labour conditions beyond the Italian community.

The International Institute of Metropolitan Toronto (1954–1974) (709 College Street) provided newcomers with counselling and employment services. They ran recreational groups and language classes and even provided opportunities for Canadians to learn about other cultural groups. Women played a key role in the Institute as leaders, organizers, and front-line social workers.

Similarly, the Italian Immigrant Aid Society was founded in 1952 to help immigrants and newcomers find housing or employment. In 1981, it merged with COSTI (Centro Organizzativo Scuole Tecniche Italiane), a multicultural non-profit that served all immigrant communities. While the original COSTI moved to 136 Beverly Street (now the home of the Italian Consulate) in the 1960s, a branch remains at 762 College Street in the form of the Corvetti Education Centre, an organization that still provides settlement and social services to newcomers all over Toronto in more than a dozen languages to this day.

As the Italian neighborhood expanded, so too did its religious life and practices.

St. Agnes (15 Grace Street) was one of the first parishes to support newcomers. It offered mass in Italian, organized patron saint celebrations, and served as a community meeting point. Postwar, other nearby churches offered services in Italian, including St. Helen at Dundas Street and Lansdowne Avenue, St. Anthony at Bloor and Dufferin Streets, and — most significantly — St. Francis of Assisi, which began to host Italian-language masses in response to the growing community in 1958 and moved to Grace Street just south of College Street in 1968.

In 1962, Vito Telesa, a sacristan at St. Agnes Church, found a statue of Christ in the church’s closet. This discovery inspired the friars and several of the young parishioners to carry the statue out into the streets in celebration. What was once a small dramatic presentation grew, eventually moving to St. Francis of Assisi. At its height, the procession included over 500 volunteers and drew crowds of over 100,000 people. Today, the procession features at least eight statues and 200 characters. It winds through the neighbourhood, always starting and ending at St. Francis’ doors. Little Italy’s Easter procession is one of the largest of its kind in North America.

By the late 1960s, Italians had begun moving north to Corso Italia and on to Woodbridge, Vaughan, and other Toronto suburbs. The demographics of the College Street neighbourhood changed.

The Royal Theatre (608 College Street) is an excellent example of the constant change in Little Italy. Architect Benjamin Swartz designed the structure in the 1930s in the Art Moderne style. The project was spearheaded by Ray Lewis, a playwright, poet, actress, and a vocal defender of the Canadian film industry. She was also the first woman impresario in Toronto to open a theatre.

After Lewis died in 1954, Rocco Mastrangelo (founder of Café Diplomatico) bought the theatre, and began to screen Italian films. Mastrangelo also rented the theatre out to local community groups. It became the informal home of the Italian theatre group Piccolo Teatro Italiano, founded by Bruno Mesaglio. The Piccolo Teatro Italiano would mount productions for over a decade, winning prestigious theatrical awards and performing for dignitaries and renowned artists. From 1983 to 1992, the Royal screened Chinese films as the Golden Princess theatre. The theatre was purchased again in the 1990s, finally receiving heritage status from the city in 2005. In a nod to the changing demographics of the community, the theatre now hosts many community events, including the Caribbean Tales Film Festival and Japanese Movie Week.

In 1970, 48% of the businesses on College Street identified with Italy or used Italian language in their names — down from 60% or higher a few decades earlier. In the 1980s, to counter this decline, the local Business Improvement Association (BIA) proposed renaming the area “Little Italy” to preserve some of this history. But when Italy won the 1982 World Cup, it was St. Clair’s Corso Italia that was famously overrun by more than 250,000 proud Italians singing, dancing, honking horns, blowing whistles, and waving the Italian flag. College Street celebrations dwarfed in comparison to what was happening to the north. By 2000, the percentage of Italian businesses had dropped by a further 29%.

Although the Italians of Toronto may no longer occupy the College Street neighbourhood in the numbers they once did, the area remains an important point in the “mental map” of Italian Canadians and their descendants throughout the city. The BIA runs themed events like the “Taste of Little Italy” and many visitors and locals enjoy the sites, sounds, smells, and tastes of the neighbourhood.