Feast of San Gennaro

Held each September across eleven days and eleven city blocks, the Feast of San Gennaro has run since 1926, when Italian immigrants from Naples first gathered on Mulberry Street to honour their patron saint, martyred in 305 AD. What began as a single-day block party has grown into New York's best-known and most enduring Italian-American street festival, drawing roughly a million visitors each year to Manhattan's historic Little Italy.

The festival opens with the Blessing of the Stands, when a parish priest blesses every vendor, restaurant and shop taking part, before eleven days of sausage and peppers, fried calamari, zeppole and cannoli fill the streets alongside carnival games, live music and a cannoli-eating contest that has become one of the event's most beloved fixtures. The Grand Procession, carrying a statue of San Gennaro through the neighbourhood accompanied by music and prayer, remains the festival's spiritual centrepiece, culminating in a solemn mass at the Church of the Most Precious Blood.

For a neighbourhood that has shrunk considerably from its early-20th-century peak, the Feast of San Gennaro remains a genuinely powerful annual reassertion of Italian-American identity — eleven days each year when Little Italy, however much smaller it has become, still belongs entirely to the culture that built it.