Federal Hill: Providence's Little Italy Still Sets the Table
Atwells Avenue under the pine cone arch — bakeries, salumerias, restaurants that have served four generations. Federal Hill is the city's oldest flavor and its most argued-over inheritance.
The arch comes first: La Pigna — the pine cone, symbol of abundance and welcome — suspended over Atwells Avenue at the gateway to Federal Hill, Providence's Little Italy and one of the great Italian-American neighborhoods left in the United States. The Hill was built by the immigrants who arrived from the 1880s onward to work the mills and jewelry shops, and it has been feeding the city, in their descendants' restaurants and bakeries, ever since.
The avenue's institutions are the region's memory: bakeries whose sfogliatelle and wandies move by the tray at holidays, salumerias and pasta shops supplying half the state's Sunday gravies, restaurants where the same families have celebrated christenings and mourned funerals in the same dining rooms across four generations. DePasquale Square, with its fountain, is the neighborhood's piazza — outdoor tables, espresso, and the evening passeggiata the Hill never quite gave up.
The Hill's modern story is negotiation: with the city's newer food scenes (Federal Hill now hosts flavors from everywhere, which the old guard mostly counts as vitality), with nightlife's noise, and with the pressures that fame puts on a working neighborhood's rents. The Columbus Day weekend festival crowds that close Atwells each fall are the argument's annual summit — heritage as street party, and as commerce.
November is a Federal Hill month: the bakeries in their Thanksgiving run-up, the dining rooms warm against the dark, the fountain still running in DePasquale Square. Neighborhoods like this one are not preserved; they are cooked, daily. The Hill is still cooking.
