Corso Italia

This guide to Corso Italia in Toronto starts on a July night in 1982, when Italy's World Cup win emptied every bakery and social club onto Saint Clair Avenue West. It traces how postwar Italian immigrants first settled Toronto's older Little Italy on College Street before saving enough to rebuild their community here in the 1970s, naming the strip for the grand boulevards back home. A five-year construction project starting in 2005 tore up the street to lay new streetcar tracks, testing every shop that had thrived here.