Little Italy is preparing to host a great classic of New York’s Italian American community: the San Gennaro Festival. The event, which attracts thousands of visitors every year, will return from September 11 to 21, 2025, transforming the streets of the neighborhood into a grand itinerary of stalls, religious processions and performances. The central date remains September 19, the day on which the Catholic Church celebrates the memory of the saint, but the celebrations will extend over eleven consecutive days.
The event was born in 1926, when a group of Neapolitan immigrants decided to reproduce overseas a festival that already had a deep-rooted tradition in Naples. Since then Mulberry Street has filled every year with crowds, tourists and the curious, who between a solemn mass and a joust find themselves immersed in a microcosm of Italian-ness. It is a tradition that endures, despite the fact that the neighborhood is now very different from the one populated by immigrants who arrived from Italy in the early 1900s.
The 2025 calendar is already full of events: on September 12 there is the blessing of the stalls, on the 13th the procession with the statue of the saint, and on the 19th the solemn mass. In between is karaoke and a meet-and-greet with Sylvester Stallone and the cast of The Tulsa King series.
The festival route will run along Mulberry Street, from Canal Street to Houston Street, and will also affect Hester Street and Grand Street. The food stands, still partly to be defined, will offer dishes that have made Italian street food famous in the United States: pasta, pizza, sausage with peppers, cannoli and zeppole. Among the venues already confirmed are historic names such as Caffè Palermo, Ferrara Bakery and Mulberry Street Bar, which over the years have become obligatory stops for those attending the event. Admission to the event is free, but to taste the dishes and participate in the games, it will be necessary to pay vendors directly, many of whom still prefer cash.
Saint Gennaro, venerated in Naples and many other parts of Italy, is remembered as a fourth-century Christian martyr. The best-known tradition associated with his cult is that of the blood preserved in ampullae, which according to popular devotion is dissolved twice a year. While in Naples the anniversary retains a predominantly religious character, in New York it has also become an occasion of collective recognition for the Italian community and a tourist attraction point that helps keep alive the historic image of Little Italy, now reduced to a few streets but still capable of transforming itself for ten days a year into a place of shared memory.
The article The San Gennaro Festival returns to Little Italy again this year comes from TheNewyorker.
