Topic: Italian Americans
The architecture and advocacy of Seattle-based architect Fred Bassetti have had a profound influence in the shaping of Seattle's skyline and Northwest urban communities, and on the professional and ci...
Mother Francesca Xavier Cabrini, Saint Cabrini was the first American citizen to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church. In her journeys around the country, she came to Seattle three times: in 190...
John Croce was the founder of Pacific Food Importers, a Seattle-area wholesale imported-food business, and its retail outlet, called Big John's PFI. The business, which began when Croce started sellin...
Giuseppe "Joe" Desimone, an immigrant from Naples, settled in Seattle's South Park neighborhood, where he made some money farming and more money investing in real estate. Like many immigrant farmers f...
Duwamish Gardens, a park in the south King County city of Tukwila, was previously a farmstead and truck farm on the Duwamish River. The land was settled and farmed by the Thomas Ray (1852-1940) family...
From 1978 to 1993, Virgil Fassio was publisher of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of Seattle's two daily newspapers at the time. A first-generation Italian American from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ...
For a good part of the last century, Gai's Northwest Bakeries was Seattle's largest bakery, supplying high-end restaurants and fast-food chains alike, and stocking area grocery stores with breads and ...
The majority of Italian immigrants arrived in the Northwest at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many came to work in the coal mines around Black Diamond; others took on construction jobs or toi...
Glynn Ross, the founding director of Seattle Opera, was known for putting Seattle on the international opera map. But he did not do so alone. His Italian-born wife, Angelamaria Solimene Ross, known as...
Father Joseph Cataldo (1837-1928), born Giuseppe Maria Cataldo in Sicily, was a Jesuit missionary who served the Pacific Northwest and its Native American communities for 60 years. He founded or serve...
When coal was king in Black Diamond, a small mining town in the Cascade foothills of southeastern King County, immigrants from Italy provided much of the muscle power that operated the coal mines. The...
Since the 1980s, the area around Walla Walla in Southeastern Washington has become noted for its wine industry, with more than 100 wineries and nearly 2,000 acres of vineyards now flourishing in the W...
Alessandro Malaspina (1754-1810), an Italian explorer who sailed under the Spanish flag, is not as well-known as others who explored the Northwest Coast in the late eighteenth century. But like contem...
Arthur Henry "Art" Mazzola was born near Boston on November 27, 1922, to Pietro and Elidia Mazzola, immigrants from northern Italy. A lover of the arts, he attended Boston University, served in the U....
This file contains Seattle historian and photographer Paul Dorpat's Now & Then photographs and reflections on the Fiore d'Italia Restaurant on 5th Avenue S in Seattle.
One of the most iconic and beloved of Northwest companies for more than a century, Oberto Brands, a business producing beef jerky, pepperoni, and other smoked meats, was family-owned until its 2018 sa...
Angelo Pellegrini, born into a sharecropper's family in rural Italy, went on to become one of America's favorite writers on the pleasures of food, wine, and community. After his family immigrated to G...
Seattle has long been home to a vibrant Italian American community. The city's Rainier Valley neighborhood, where many Italian American homes and businesses coalesced, was fondly (or, conversely, with...
Leno Prestini was an Italian American artist who worked as a modeler for the Washington Brick and Lime Company's terra cotta operation in Clayton (Stevens County). Prestini also fired tiles and sculpt...
Albert D. Rosellini, governor of Washington state from 1956 to 1965, was born to Italian American immigrants in Tacoma on January 21, 1910. The family relocated to Seattle's Rainier Valley in 1916. De...
Victor Rosellini founded a string of acclaimed and successful restaurants in downtown Seattle and became known as Seattle's premiere host. He opened Rosellini's 610 in 1950, and Rosellini's Four-10 in...
Tightwad Hill is a celebrated part of Seattle baseball lore. Situated in the Rainier Valley on a rise east of Rainier Avenue and just north of McClellan Street, the hillside was owned for decades by f...
This is the little-known story of the vital roles played by federal convicts and Italian prisoners of war in supporting the U.S. war effort at Hanford and the Tri-Cities during World War II. The natio...