‘More than food, feast and bocce’ - Cleveland’s Italian Cultural Garden (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Visit a major city in the United States, and there is a good chance you could stumble across a “Little Italy,” some variation of the one found along Mayfield Road in Cleveland featuring fine dining, bakeries and the yearly Feast of the Assumption.

What you won’t find most places elsewhere is something like the Italian Cultural Garden a couple of miles away, celebrating Italian heritage in the Cleveland Cultural Gardens for nearly 100 years.

This is part of a series of stories from cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer exploring the Cleveland Cultural Gardens and the ethnic communities each garden represents. Read the ongoing series at this link.

Dedicated in 1930, the Italian Cultural Garden was initially created as “a symbol of the contribution of Italian culture to American democracy,” according to the cultural gardens.

The Italian Garden is designed in a formal Renaissance style. On the upper level of the garden, a fountain modeled after the fountain in the Villa Medici in Rome sits in the center of the garden, surrounded by several busts and new plaques, including the poet Virgil and artists Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Two staircases wind down to the garden’s lower level off Martin Luther King Drive and into the amphitheater with a secondary fountain. Visitors can find roses, salvia, catnip, ginkgo trees and daffodils throughout the garden.

But age doesn’t prevent the garden from evolving in modern times, which is in the middle of a $1.5 million restoration.

Recent additions include a bronze statue of Dante Alighieri, restoration of the landscape fountains, lighting, benches, and a memorial balustrade to Philip J. Garbo, the original creator of the garden.

Future plans include constructing a replica of the Pantheon.

“I want to make an outdoor museum,” says Joyce Mariani, executive director of the Italian Cultural Garden Federation. “From the time of the Romans down to the Renaissance and modern-day, Italy fostered hundreds of cultural greats in the arts and science and we’ll never have room to get them all in.”

The garden is also host to numerous events throughout the year, including Opera in the Italian Garden, a yearly event that brings in more than 2,500 people to watch ballet and opera in the garden. Both art forms originated in Italy.

Mariani says events like this help expand people’s understanding of Italian culture.

The Italian culture is “not only food, the Feast [of Assumption] and Bocce,” Mariani says.

While the Italian Culture Garden is nearing its 100-year anniversary, Italian immigrants have come to Cleveland since the 1800s.

In the 1870 census, 35 Italians were counted in Cleveland. But in the 50 years that followed, more than 20,000 Italians emigrated to Cleveland, mainly from Southern Italy, where poverty was extreme. By the late 1920s, the first wave of immigrants established six Italian neighborhoods.

Big Italy encompassed Woodland and Orange avenues from East Ninth Street to East 40th Street. Little Italy stretched along Mayfield and Murray Hill roads. A third community could be found on East 107th Street and Cedar Avenue, a fourth in Collinwood, a fifth on Clark and Fulton avenues, and the final one on Detroit Avenue near West 65th Street.

“We had established Italian communities,” Mariani says. “But when the immigrants came, they were so separated even though they were from the same country, they wouldn’t say they were necessarily from Italy.”

Mariani says this is because Italian immigrants came from different regions within Italy, which differed in language and culture. For instance, instead of telling people they were from Italy, they would identify themselves as from Calabria, a southwestern region of Italy.

Italians were often discriminated against upon arrival, famously met with signs like “Italians need not apply” when looking for work. Yet many Italians provided cheap labor for factory work and worked on stonecutting, cooking, embroidering and needlework, and managing fruit stands.

This introduced Cleveland and Northeast Ohio to oranges, olive oil, figs, anchovies, garlic, bananas and nuts, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

Italians also formed the newspaper La Voce, which interpreted American law, economic and social rights, citizenship, and offered news from the homeland. Hometown societies helped bring traditions from their respective villages in Italy to Cleveland, and the church acted as a unifying place for all Italians.

Little Italy would be the neighborhood that persevered, while people who moved out of Big Italy to the Woodland and East 116th Street region.

World War II brought a change to the Cleveland Italian population. Despite initial support for Mussolini, Cleveland Italians eventually assisted in the war effort on the side of the United States, with many even going to war for the country. Upon their return, Italians moved to the suburbs, including Mayfield Heights, Lyndhurst and Parma.

By the 1960s, the Cleveland Italian population began to see a reduction. In the 1960 census, nearly 20,000 first-and second-generation Italians lived in the city. By 1970, the population dropped to 17,693, and less than 14,000 people were born in Italy, according to Italian Americans and Their Communities of Cleveland by Gene Veronesi.

While Italian immigrants have dwindled from the 20,000-person peak a century ago, more than 192,000 people in the Cleveland metropolitan area claim Italian ancestry as of 2021, according to the Census Bureau.

The main entrance of the Italian Garden is on East Boulevard, between the Greek and Czech gardens. It can also be accessed on Martin Luther King Blvd, across from the Ukrainian garden.

Zachary Smith is the data reporter for cleveland.com. You can reach him at zsmith@cleveland.com. See previous data stories at this link.

This story also included additional reporting from Paris Wolfe.