Little Italy

This guide to Little Italy in Montreal centers on Caffe Italia on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, run by the same family since 1956, when Nadia Serri's grandparents carried their Tuscan roots across the ocean. It traces how Italian railway and quarry workers built this neighborhood from the 1880s onward, growing to more than fifteen thousand residents by the mid-1950s, and how farmers a few blocks north founded the Jean-Talon Market during the Depression. Listen for how three generations of one family have kept pulling espresso at the same worn counter.