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Showtime Under the Stars in Little Italy
 | | Grant L. Gursky | | Little Italy's film festival turns part of the neighborhood into a piazza. |
The moon hangs high and white over Little Italy tonight. If you could see it, you'd swear it's Cosmo's moon. That, of course, would be the full moon from the classic movie Moonstruck.
As it happens, we're sitting in the heart of the old Italian enclave in Baltimore – 3,000 of us – beneath the real moon and stars, watching Cosmo's moon, projected from a third-floor row house bedroom onto a blank white billboard.
A gentle breeze carries the aroma of some of the delectable Italian dishes cooking in the kitchens of 18 restaurants that still do it as it's done in the Old Country. A blue strand of light beams from the tiny window of the row house, 108 feet from the billboard-turned-screen – the perfect distance, it turns out. (Fate, neighborhood old-timers say.)
John Pente's sons used to sleep in the bedroom with yellow flowered wallpaper and a crucifix above the twin beds, before they grew up and moved out, decades ago. Tonight, a 300-pound movie projector sits next to the windowsill. And Mr. Pente, who has lived in Little Italy all of his 93 years, is a hometown hero.
For everybody knows this great gathering of humanity that transforms a parking lot and street into a piazza could not be but for "Mr. John." He's the one who lets people haul this huge projector into his house and traipse through Friday nights in summer to show movies from his open window.
What draws thousands of people to see Moonstruck (yet again) or other movies that left the theaters years – or decades – ago?
"It's not about the little old man with the projector," Pente says. "It's not about that screen over there. It's about why 3,000 people come out and sit in the street to watch a movie they've seen five times. They love the neighborhood. It's always a fine time."
That it is. The celebration – a cross between a street festival and a 21st-century version of the drive-in theater, minus the cars – starts hours before the movie itself.
A man cranks the handle of a century-old hand organ that his great-grandfather used to play in barrooms. On this night, people snack on the 1,000 cupcakes – with red, white and blue icing – donated by the nearby Flag House & Star-Spangled Banner Museum. A pianist plays an electronic keyboard and croons Sinatra tunes as a drummer behind him keeps the beat. Two dozen couples dance across the parking lot.
People line up 20 deep outside the door of Vaccaro's Italian Pastry Shop, creator of some of the best desserts on the East Coast. A block away, the Italian diner selling subs stuffed with meatballs that taste like an Italian grandma made them is packed with people.
 | | Grant L. Gursky | | A blue strand of light beams from the window of the row house, 108 feet from the billboard-turned-screen – the perfect distance. |
A group of moviegoers sits around a folding table – one of many – with a cake in the center and sings "Happy Birthday." A horse-drawn carriage eases past the crowds spilling over barriers into a two-lane thoroughfare in the neighborhood. Chatter and laughter and shouts – "Joseph! How ya doing, Joseph?" – ring out. Grandparents and young professionals, kids from the suburbs and babies in strollers seem mesmerized by it all.
Stroll around the corner, and you see men doing what men have been doing since the days of the Roman empire: playing bocce ball.
Here, they roll the balls on two long lighted courts, and the uninitiated spectators sitting on benches painted red, white and green – the colors of the Italian flag – listen to the banter and try to figure out what these guys are doing. At last, darkness falls, and you look around you, then up at the stars and this big white moon, and you think why can't every night be Friday night and why can't every neighborhood be just like this one on this night?
 | | Grant L. Gursky | | A 300-pound movie projector sits next to the window of a third-floor bedroom in John Pente's row house. |
Cher, Nicholas Cage, Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia appear on the screen, and the old folks in this quintessential Italian neighborhood see vague reflections of themselves, projected on a blank billboard, art imitating life imitating art.
Sure, cinema al fresco has taken hold in other places around America. Cities from New York to Honolulu have begun to offer outdoor cinema in recent years. Some have gigantic screens and state-of-the-art sound systems. Which is to say the antithesis of Baltimore's Little Italy Film Festival, whose story line could be right out of a Frank Capra movie.
A parking garage went up, and an old building came down – and with it a wall painted with a sign to welcome visitors to Little Italy. So restaurateurs decided in 1998 to compensate with a mural with their restaurant names on it. It was to be painted on a white billboard that workers put on the side of a restaurant.
One of Little Italy's famous spats among its own ensued, as some thought this white board would lead to a bunch of crass billboards in the neighborhood. Then the city ordered the work stopped, but didn't say the billboard had to come down. So it sat, blank, for a year. People joked that it looked like a movie screen right there above the Da Mimmo restaurant parking lot.
Mary Ann Cricchio, proprietor of Da Mimmo, recalls a meeting of the restaurant association when the talked turned to that ugly, yellowing board with peeling paint. "I said, 'Look guys we've got to make a decision now. What are we going to do with this board up there?' And they said, 'Why don't you show movies on it?' "
 | | Grant L. Gursky | | 'It's about why 3,000 people come out and sit in the street to watch a movie they've seen five times,' says John Pente. 'They love the neighborhood.' |
Another restaurateur retorted: "We don't know anything about movies. We know about spaghetti."
But Cricchio's mind flashed back to a trip the summer before, to her husband's homeland in Palermo, Sicily. "One night, we went down to the piazza to get an ice cream and saw people sitting in rows looking at a wall and said, 'What are they doing?' Then we saw they were watching a movie."
Back home, she took snapshots of the blank billboard and its surroundings and took them to the owner of a local movie theater, who asked about the possibility of putting a movie projector in John Pente's window. Mr. Pente wanted no compensation but knew the one thing he needed to know, and that was enough: "I thought it was good for the neighborhood."
Little Italy's graying now, what with the kids fleeing to the suburbs to raise their kids. But they still come back for events such as movie night and the saints' festivals, and who can resist a good Little Italy story told by Italians? Like the one about the night when the Great Fire of 1904 raged, destroying much of downtown Baltimore. Residents prayed to St. Anthony to intercede and save the neighborhood, and the fire stopped just outside Little Italy.
A miracle, the locals said. Now every June, the neighborhood gives thanks at the two-day St. Anthony Festival, when a statue of the saint leads a procession, people dance in the streets, compete in contests and feast on pasta, ravioli, fried dough and Italian sausage sold from stands.
 | | Grant L. Gursky | | A couple embraces while taking in a movie at the outdoor film festival. |
In August, the locals put on a similar celebration at the Saint Gabriel Festival. And in September, restaurants donate foods for the two-day Taste of Italy, which brings delicious Italian food to stands under a tent to raise money to help pay for the summer movies.
Each year, fittingly, the Little Italy Film Festival ends with Cinema Paradiso, an Italian movie about a little boy's love affair with the movies. But it will never again be just a movie for Michael Defensor and Jennifer McNamee.
They met here in Little Italy in 1999, on the night Cinema Paradiso was showing. She asked him to dance and
shared her gelato, and they kept coming back to the movies.
More Information
Movies start every Friday at 9 p.m. from July 2 to Aug. 29 at the corner of High and Stiles streets in Baltimore. Check for movie schedule. For more on the neighborhood, visit the Little Italy site. |
On the closing night of the 2001 festival, Cinema Paradiso played again, and Mr. Defensor asked McNamee to marry him.
He says, "She offered me her gelato, and that was it."
She says, "It was the craziest thing. He was talking to a friend, and I reached out and touched him, and it was the strangest feeling, the greatest feeling. We were totally smitten with each other right away, completely into each other."
Ah, romance worthy of the movies, in Little Italy, neighborhood of magic and miracles.
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