The magnificent Italian Renaissance Nazzaro Center (the former North Bennett Street bathhouse) was designed by the extraordinarily talented and prolific Charles D. MaGinnis, who specialized in Catholic churches and institutions and had apprenticed under Boston’s last official city architect, Edmund March Wheelwright. The effort to designate it a Boston landmark is fully justified.

The North End’s dense urbanity and tight irregular street pattern, worthy of a European village and long so closely identified with its Italian population of the past century, is almost unique in the United States. The Nazzaro, one of the North End’s few symbolically Italian buildings, stands at its very heart, facing a small piazza-like playground.