Washington displays its Italian inheritance openly beneath the Capitol dome, where the

immigrant artist Constantino Brumidi painted some of the building’s most familiar

frescoes. Even the iconic Watergate Hotel, now shorthand for political scandal, was

designed by an Italian architect. Yet unlike New York, Boston or Baltimore, the Capital

has no neighborhood called Little Italy.

It came close. Beginning in the 1890s, Italian immigrants settled within Swampoodle,

the working-class district near the Capitol first associated with Irish newcomers. Their

community clustered along the eastern edge of Judiciary Square toward Second Street.

Holy Rosary Church became its center.

The parish began in 1913, when Father Nicola DeCarlo celebrated Mass in the parlor of

a rented house on H Street. Within a decade, the Holy Rosary congregation had

become the religious and social anchor of DC’s Italian community, though

the neighborhood never acquired the famous name or commercial identity of its

counterparts elsewhere on the East Coast.

Then Washington redrew the map. In the late 1950s, the federal government routed

Interstate 395 along Second Street while federal buildings replaced parishioners’

homes. Early plans called for Holy Rosary itself to be demolished. A parish campaign

saved the church, but not its rectory or the surrounding residential buildings.

What survived can still be visited on foot. Holy Rosary continues to celebrate Sunday

Mass in Italian, followed by espresso and cappuccino at neighboring Casa Italiana.

Conceived as parishioners dispersed, the cultural center gave the community’s

language and traditions a permanent address.

Washington never developed a Little Italy marked by a grand arch or mapped out for tourists.

The neighborhood no longer surrounds the institution. The institution

carries the neighborhood.