Little Italy

This guide to Little Italy in Chicago starts with a Sicilian tradition carried to Taylor Street: toasted breadcrumbs sprinkled on spaghetti instead of cheese, standing in for sawdust on a table built to repay a vow made during a famine. It traces that promise to Saint Joseph back across generations, from Sicily to the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii, founded in 1911 as the city's oldest Italian American parish. Bread twisted into the shapes of a carpenter's tools, a hammer, a ladder, a saw, lined the tables' steps, free for anyone hungry.