The festival, a partnership between the Little Italy Restaurant Association and The Senator Theatre , actually emerged from a neighborhood dispute over the billboard. The blank board hung over a restaurant parking lot for a year until one resident pointed out that it resembled a drive-in theater. A few ideas and a few phone calls later, the film festival was born. On Friday evenings locals and suburbanites jammed the parking lot, arranging their beach chairs in prime locations for the free showings. The film festival is just one of the ways in which this tiny ethnic community manages to charm its visitors.
Italian flags flap above rooftop gardens.
Awnings and wooden benches are striped with red, green and white paint. Ceramic Madonnas peer out from bay windows. Meticulously maintained brick and formstone row homes punctuate the strips of restaurants for which Little Italy is known. A statue protects this formstone house. Yes, the neighborhood's residents celebrate their ethnicity with the same zest as their ancestors who moved to the area in the 1880s.