There is a hall on Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that on the last Wednesday of every month transforms into something very familiar to anyone who has ever been to a “Sagra” in Italy. It offers the smell of food, the red and white tablecloths, the folding chairs, shared stories and, above all, a sense of community. This is Cinema Club Piacere. Founded by Kevin D'Angelo and hosted at the Society of Saint Mary of the Snow — a mutual aid society anchoring Italian life in Williamsburg since 1888 — Cinema Club Piacere has become one of the most vital cultural projects in New York City.

The formula is simple: free monthly screenings of Italian and Italian-American cinema, open to everyone, no ticket, no reservation, no dress code. D'Angelo's love for Italian film runs deep: for him, a Fellini or a De Sica movie is not entertainment but a reminder that explains who he is and where he comes from. Bringing that love into a 138-year-old community hall rather than an art house was a deliberate cultural act. What makes the project even more remarkable is the mix of the audience: nonnas old enough to remember when Williamsburg was loudly Italian; younger Italian Americans, many of them navigating a more diffuse relationship to their heritage; Italian expats, students, professionals and artists, people for whom these films are not nostalgia but simply the cinema of their home country; and film lovers who have no Italian connection but who have heard of Cinema Club Piacere through word of mouth.

If the film is the incentive, the togetherness is the result. Italian-American community life in New York has always had a complicated relationship with the city, shifting from insularity to more dispersed. As the old neighborhoods have gentrified and the second and third generations have scattered across the boroughs and the suburbs and beyond, the question of how Italian-American culture survives has become urgent. The answer, Cinema Club Piacere suggests, is not to close ranks but to open them, not to preserve a relic but to create something new. In a New York that never stops changing Cinema Club Piacere is what Italian culture looks like when it's alive and vibrant.