Walking around College Street with Joe Pantalone and a half-eaten loaf of Italian bread, I’m trying to take the temperature of the Italian-Canadian response to Silvio Berlusconi and the Italian financial breakdown. A hot dog restaurant feels like a good place to begin.
“Berlusconi’s a sexual, sensual man,” says Sam Santino, owner of the Big Chill and the Little Dog, a newly opened, Montreal-influenced hot dog shop that specializes in wieners and makes its owner an astute judge of powerful Italian men. Santino, like Pantalone, the former deputy mayor and one-time rival of our current mayor, his petulance Rob Ford, was raised in the Little Italy neighbourhood (the streets off College between Shaw and Bathurst) and is a first-generation Canadian, with much of his extended family still calling Italy home.
“What’s happening in Italy is horrible, but it’s happening all over Europe,” says Santino, who hopes his children, aged 18 and 20, manage their money better than the country his parents called home. “I watch the news and I worry, but I’m Canadian-Italian not Italian-Canadian, and there’s a big difference between the two things.”
In Pantalone’s estimation — and he represented the Little Italy neighbourhood at City Hall for almost 30 years — the former Italian stomping ground is less than 10 per cent Italian today. Many of the business owners are still Italian — and landmark destinations like Bar Italia and Café Diplomatico still have Italians running the show — but rising rents and the lure of the suburbs are shaking out the area’s Italian roots.
From left: Kaplan hams it up in Little Italy, samples some local goods, and ensures he and “guide” Joe Pantalone don’t leave with an empty stomach
I meet Pantalone at his house on Beatrice Street, and he says that, when he and his six brothers and sisters first moved into the area, his mother used to send him to whichever local bakery had that day’s steepest discounts on bread.
“Housing used to be affordable; it no longer is,” says Pantalone, wearing a ball cap and leather jacket as we begin our stroll along the Garrison Creek Ravine. “Unfortunately, for shop owners in this area, it’s make it big or lose big, and if you don’t have high turnover, you don’t stand a chance.”
I live in the Little Italy area, which is bad news for long-time residents. In New York, when I moved into my trendy neighbourhood in Little Italy on Mulberry Street, it marked the apex of gentrification. I paid $1,150 for a hovel inside a crumbling building where tenants under their rent-controlled agreement were dropping $350 a month. My dad used to joke that he worked so hard to move away from the neighbourhood just so I could afford to move back in.
Walking the College Street area with Pantalone, there’s a feeling that Little Italy is still a small town. We can’t make it past two red-sauced Italian restaurants without someone calling out, “Hi, Mr. Joe!”
“Berlusconi is all about Berlusconi. I think it’s time for him to go,” says Rocco Reale, the owner of Riviera Bakery at College and Manning, who takes us into his kitchen where we snack on a bowl of grapes from his village in Calabria. Reale is the real deal, just what you want from a College Street owner: a guy who picks up a piece of prosciutto from his meat slicer and places it into your mouth. Of course, the meat, like the grapes, are delicious. After all, Riviera is what’s known as a “scratch bakery,” meaning everything in the store is made from scratch. Fill up on bread at many of the College Street restaurants and, odds are, the bread you ate too much of is Rocco Reale’s. (Also: how many people do you meet named Rocco these days?) Pantalone and I have espresso and he tries to be diplomatic about his feelings for big Rob Ford.
“Any government has to be for all of the people and try and reach a broad consensus, but the mayor has a tendency not to do that,” he says and points out that Mayor Ford’s greatest gift to the city may be in his unifying the disparate strands of the left. “You can’t have simplistic solutions to complicated problems,” Pantalone says. “It means you do harm.”
We talk about the Occupy movement and his girlfriend; the area's best restaurants (he recommends Giancarlo Trattoria) and the differences between fathers and mothers when it comes to raising kids. (My daughter Esme is three months old now, and my wife, Julie, is twice or maybe 12 times the parent that I am.)
Afterward, Rocco gives me a loaf of bread still hot from his oven — Riviera is one of the places Pantalone used to come as a kid — and I’m nibbling on it along College Street when we run into Lenny Lombardi, son of Johnny Lombardi, the original founder of CHIN Radio.
It's amazing the things you see when you walk College Street with someone from the area. A place I’d pretty much dedicated to drinking at the Mod Club and Revival and eating at the meatball-riffic new restaurant Hey Meatball is suddenly like this little hamlet where everyone knows one another. And, what’s more, they know where the metaphorical bodies are buried. It’s so cool to get something deeper out of Little Italy than a buzz. Pantalone and I start talking with Lombardi about the Italian saga and the Berlusconi bunga bunga parties, and Lombardi says that the end of Berlusconi means brighter days for Italians all over the world.
“Sometimes change in itself is good,” says Lombardi, a dead ringer for his famous dad, who sits immortalized in a statue at the corner of College and Grace. Lombardi was raised in the area, still lives there today and says the future of Italy, like the future of Little Italy in Toronto, is an ability to adapt to the times while keeping your identity.
“Berlusconi stepping down ushers in a new era,” says Lombardi. “I think about Italy and feel for the people back home who’ve suffered, but these streets are my place in the world.”
I walk Pantalone home, then hop on my bike in time to read Esme a story before bed.