For 30 years, Seattle’s Festa Italiana has celebrated and honored everything Italian. It’s an annual week-long series of events where our Northwest Italian-American community showcases the very best in Italian food, culture, products and entertainment. It is the largest ethnic festival featured at Seattle Center. 

This year, festival-goers enjoyed free performances on three stages with special concerts from New York tenor Aaron Caruso and local favorite Tony La Stella. Another highlight was traditional Italian songs and dance performed by the children of Cinquegranelli Montessori School. Events included great Italian Chefs cooking demonstrations, the Festa Grape Stomp, a Boce Tournament, Italian classic cars, old world puppets and dog breed show. Then there’s the food, an endless selection of Italian-American favorites while relaxing in the wine garden.

Whatever your background and heritage, a wonderful time was had by all.

In the Fisher Pavilion, vendors offered a wide variety of Italian products and cultural information. “We the Italians” were part of our booth featuring books from Italy. Local author and cook, Lee Casazza kept busy selling Big Mamma’s Italian-American Cookbook while I introduced people to this media company in Italy. Since 2015, we’ve been a fan of Umberto Mucci and “We the Italians”. He interviewed Lee about the many popular Italian-American recipes people enjoy here. We used our two days at the Festa to help promote his website, newsletters, online magazine and annual yearbook. Handing out flyers and talking about Umberto’s work, I made many new friends.

That includes Tony La Stella, Marzia Menegon, and David Madrid, the host of the Northwest Italian Radio Show in Seattle. This popular one-hour show is pure Italian fun. Now that they know about “We the Italians”, I’m hoping Umberto will be their guest too.

Connecting Italian people is a wonderful thing to do.