Annual festival in Little Italy a slice of the old country; Bocce tournament debuts at street fair
The San Diego Union - Tribune; San Diego, Calif.; Oct 22, 2001; Eleanor Yang

As he played bocce, joked with old friends and enjoyed music, Luigi Pelliccia felt like he was back in his native Italy yesterday.

Pelliccia and fellow San Diego Bocce Club teammates were among the estimated 50,000 people who gathered in Little Italy yesterday for the seventh annual Little Italy Italian Festa.

People gathered at the Italian street fair to play ball, listen to jazz and opera performers and feast on sausage, pizza and gelato. The event included a staged Italian wedding with traditional dancing, dozens of street artists, and Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin impersonators.

A first at this year's festival was a bocce tournament, which drew 11 teams to Amici Park, some from as far away as Sacramento.

Growing up in Rome, Pelliccia often would play bocce, which is closely related to lawn bowling. He and neighborhood friends would improvise, using flat rocks as balls and the front lawn as their court.

"When we went on picnics, the bocce balls were the first things loaded in the car," Pelliccia said yesterday. "We play everywhere. It's the same game, different tools."

Yesterday, he and the other players tossed grapefruit-size balls down an 88-foot-long lane, trying to come as close as possible to one golf-ball-size ball. After each ball was tossed, teammates, nearly all of whom were born in Italy, would yell "Bravo!" and applaud.

Michael D'Agata of La Verne leaned forward and launched a ball down the lane, coming within a foot of the pallino, the targeted ball.

"All right, I like that," said teammate Franco Casciani of Glendale. "When you play that good ball, it makes me feel good."

The festival is part of the rebirth of Little Italy, said Marco Li Mandri, president of the nonprofit Little Italy Association of San Diego. Organizers described the fair as the largest seasonal Italian event of its kind on the West Coast.

Many in the crowd, including 74-year-old Joe Adamo, remembered Little Italy as it was before the 1950s, when the neighborhood was packed with Italian and Portuguese families. Adamo, who was born and raised on India Street in the heart of the neighborhood, sat eating calamari and catching up with old friends yesterday.

He, along with hundreds of others, moved out in the mid-1950s when Interstate 5 was built, displacing many residents. But Adamo, Li Mandri and others are hopeful about the community's revival. The 48-square-block neighborhood, which Li Mandri estimates is home to about 4,000 residents, is expected to double in population during the next four or five years. With the completion of two tall condominium complexes and the plans for several more, Li Mandri said, the neighborhood is going through a massive evolution.

Although the new generation of restaurants and stores strikes Adamo as more commercial, he's happy about the growing population.

"It's become a tourist attraction, but I think it's great," said Adamo, who lives in Mission Hills. "It's more business for the restaurants and the shops."

As for Pelliccia, it's the atmosphere on the bocce courts that lures him from his Rancho Penasquitos home.

"This brings me back in our old country," he said.