Barrio Italia

This guide to Barrio Italia in Santiago traces the neighborhood back to around 1905, when the Girardi family opened a hat factory on the edge of Providencia and Italian immigrant workers filled the cheap tenements built up around it. It follows the grand art deco cinema the family raised for their own workforce in the 1930s, and the neighborhood's shift once the hat trade stopped paying the bills. You'll hear how a different trade moved into the factory's old rooms by the 1990s. Best explored on foot along Calle Caupolican.