Commercial Drive hosted Italian Day on Sunday, but the city’s Italian community was once farther west
David P. Ball · CBC News – A short metal gate separates Angelo Tosi’s cavernous vault of Italian cheeses, salamis, pastas and premium tinned tomatoes from the loud traffic of Vancouver’s Main Street.
“You wanna come in?” the 90-year-old says as he opens the gate for a man seeking parmesan. “Here you go.”
On most days, Tosi’s door is shuttered, with a handwritten sign instructing would-be customers: “Ring bell. Suonare il campanello.”
His shop — inherited from his father who founded it nearly 120 years ago — is one of the few remaining vestiges of a thriving Italian-Canadian community that once called the area its main home in the city.
On Sunday, the community is celebrating Italian Day on Commercial Drive, the street more commonly associated with the Mediterranean culture.
But for most of the 20th century, until the 1970s, Vancouver’s Little Italy was in fact found in Strathcona neighbourhood just east of Main Street.
Tosi points to a black-and-white photograph of himself as a young man, carrying a bag of flour outside the shop.
“My dad started this in 1906 … and at the time there were a lot of Italians here,” he told CBC News. “And then if you went to the back alleys, you would find people playing bocce. There was a lot of wine. Lots of fun.
“There’s still a few Italians here, but not too many.”
Only a few of the original fixtures of Vancouver’s old Little Italy remain today: a family-centred community once anchored around bocce courts, curbside carts to buy grapes imported for wine, and food importers such as Tosi’s, Benny’s Italian Market on Union Street, and the long-relocated Bosa Foods and Venice bakery.
A key fixture of Strathcona’s Little Italy, however, still operates: Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church.
That’s where Ray Culos was baptized, served as an altar boy, and later married.
“We were really closely connected with the church,” explained Culos, who grew up in the neighbourhood and whose Italian parents came to Canada where they settled in Strathcona.
“That was a big thing on Sunday, and then you ended up at someone’s house for lunch or coffee.”
Then, he said, men in white collared shirts and dark pants would assemble at the area’s dozen or so bocce ball courts — including one in his grandparents’ yard — and play the Italian lawn bowling game.
The prize? Home-made wine, made from grapes his family imported from California similar to the Italian vintages they loved.
“Growing up was a wonderful experience for me personally because it was a great place to live,” Culos, a member of the Italian Cultural Centre Society, told CBC News. “Everybody knew you and they knew your parents. You couldn’t get away with anything!
“The people of Italian origin were dominant there.”
Fighting back against displacement
Culos said he inherited from his parents a desire to support their community — and at the same time to cultivate trusting relationships with other immigrants in the area, also home to Chinatown, Japantown, and Hogan’s Alley, the city’s one-time Black neighbourhood before it was pushed out to make way for a freeway.
Residents representing the area’s cultural and economic diversity rallied to stop the project.
