By Season Osborn
Albino Greco comes to the seniors’ residence on Baseline Road every day to play cards. It is one place he doesn’t need to struggle to speak English. His playing partners all speak Italian.
There is no card game at the Villa Marconi now and Greco sits in an armchair near the fireplace. At a small round table beside him, three senior men drink coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Each left Italy and moved to Canada for work and a better life.
“Why I come to Canada? For the money. I did very good,” Greco says.
Greco, 65, immigrated in 1974 and worked laying asphalt, paving roads in and around Ottawa. Umberto Olivieri arrived in 1966 and worked in the drywall business. Rosarito Dinardo came to Canada in 1959 and worked in construction.
“The Italians built Ottawa,” says Angelo Filoso, a Villa Marconi board member and general manager of a heating and air-conditioning company.
Filoso says that “the real physical builders of Ottawa,” the stonemasons, bricklayers, plasterers, painters, pavers and construction workers, were Italian.
His own father was a stonemason who came to Ottawa in 1951, like many other immigrants, when there was no work in Italy after the Second World War. By 1956, he had saved enough money to bring his wife and children to Canada.
The Filosos settled in the Preston Street area where Ottawa’s large Italian community lived. The area is still known as Little Italy. The Preston and Gladstone street signs sport little green, white and red Italian flags and have Italian names below the traditional English ones. Preston Street is known to locals as Corso Italia. Gladstone Avenue is Via Marconi.
Ottawa’s Italian community is as old as Confederation. Ten Italian families were recorded living near Sussex Drive in 1867. About 37,435 Italians live in the city today.
Two local Italian newspapers serve the community. Il Postino is printed in English, French and Italian. L’Ora di Ottawa, published since 1968, is solely in Italian.
“The paper gives the Italian community something to read in Italian and at the same time promotes the Italian culture,” says Luciano Gonella, L’Ora di Ottawa’s editor.
“Because you know, there is a danger where people go to live in another country to lose their identity and lose their language.”
Jennie Prosperine, 84, says her father came to Ottawa in one of the first waves of Italian immigrants in 1903. He was foreman of a road paving crew.
The first Italian families purchased land at Gladstone Avenue and Booth Street and built St. Anthony’s Church in 1913. The church became the focal point of the Italian community. Prosperine’s family was part of that community.
While the men were building Ottawa, the women kept busy feeding the Italian community. Prosperine remembers the first local stores to sell pasta, sausages, Italian tomatoes and cheeses. In the early years, these little grocery stores were all operated by Italian women: Mrs. Buccino, Mrs. Adamo, Mrs. Luciano, and Mrs. Defalco.
Preston Street is still lined with ristorantes and trattorias, or cafes, and is renowned for the best Italian meals in the city.
Ottawa’s Little Italy population swelled in the 1950s with postwar immigrants.
In the early 1960s, when several blocks of houses between Booth and Preston streets were expropriated to build the High School of Commerce and social assistance housing, a large portion of the displaced Italian community moved to Nepean.
When the city amalgamated in 2000, Bob Chiarelli, a second-generation Italian-Canadian was elected mayor.
“The Italian community is very proud of him,” says Filoso. “The Canadian dream really works. You can become whatever you want. If you want it, it happens.”