Where Sassano
came to Chicago.

A town small enough that everyone knew everyone.

Starting in the late 1890s, an area bounded by South 47th and 51st Streets along Armour Avenue — later renamed Federal Street — became home to hundreds of Italian immigrants from Sassano, a small town in the hills 95 miles southeast of Naples. Francesco Riccio, Nicola di Brizzi, Francesco Cavallone, his father-in-law Michele Libretti, and his brother Vincenzo Cavallone were among the first to arrive, between 1893 and 1898.

They weren't the first Italians in the neighborhood — families from Teggiano had settled nearby around 1885 — but parish marriage records suggest Cono Stavola, who married Maria Policastro on 12 February 1893, may have been the very first Sassanese to reach Chicago at all.

By the 1940 Census, Sassanesi families owned much of Federal Street between 47th and 50th. Many arrived as junk dealers and became grocers, restaurateurs, saloon owners, and sanitation workers — building, home by home, the life they couldn't have in Southern Italy after unification. Most married and baptized their children at Santa Maria Incoronata, the Riciglianesi parish on Alexander and Wentworth.

Read about the research behind this project →

What Federal Street actually looked like.

Most of what we know about daily life on Federal Street comes from family memory, census records, and city directories — useful, but distant. One document gets much closer: Alice Quan Rood's 1924 University of Chicago Master's dissertation, Social Conditions Among the Negroes on Federal Street Between Forty-Fifth Street and Fifty-Third Street, a firsthand social-work survey of the very blocks the Sassanesi called home, written while our great-grandparents' generation was still living there.

Rood's study was primarily about the neighborhood's African American residents, but she took the time to note the small Italian community living alongside them too — and what she found lines up closely with everything else this site documents about crowded, hardworking immigrant households. "Much over-crowding is found among the few Italian residents of Federal Street," she wrote, and the specific cases she recorded are worth sitting with.