Columbus Day comes Friday, Oct. 12 and is officially observed Monday, Oct. 8, and Wilton has no planned festivities. But that doesn’t mean there is no local Italian community. On the contrary, Italians are one of the largest nationality groups in Wilton, according to the U.S. Census American Communities Survey of 2016.

In the survey, residents who reported Italian heritage numbered 2,807, making Italians the second-largest ethnicity group in Wilton, next to the Irish, at 3,004 people. The next two largest groups were Germans, at 2,051, and English, at 1,998. Other ethnic groups like Polish and French came in much smaller numbers, nowhere near the top four. In Fairfield County as a whole, there were 100,772 people of Irish descent, 90,379 of Italian heritage, 68,882 Germans and 55,378 English, according to the data.