A Street Party a Century in the Making
Every spring, the 9th Street Italian Market shuts down to cars and opens up to everything else. The Italian Market Festival — typically held over a Saturday and Sunday in May — turns a working street of delis, butcher counters, cheese shops, and produce stands into one of the city's most genuinely joyful public events. No velvet ropes, no corporate sponsors plastered over everything. Just South Philly doing what South Philly does.
The festival grew out of the neighborhood's tradition of saint's day processions, the kind of street devotion southern Italian immigrants brought with them from Campania, Sicily, and Calabria when they settled these blocks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Market itself dates to that same era, and the festival is, in part, a yearly acknowledgment that the whole thing is still here, still functioning, still feeding people.
The Greased Pole, the Procession, the Eating
The cooking smells alone make the walk from Washington Avenue to Wharton Street worth the trip.
The centerpiece that draws the cameras is the albero della cuccagna — the grease pole. A tall wooden pole is slathered in grease and a prize hung at the top; teams of competitors lock arms and climb over one another in a sweaty, laughing, usually futile attempt to reach it. The tradition is Neapolitan in origin and survives here with full comic dignity intact.
A procession moves through the street as well, honoring the neighborhood's Catholic heritage — the kind of street-level faith that built the parish churches still standing a few blocks in either direction from 9th.
Then there is the eating, which is the real reason most people come. Vendors set up along the corridor, and the regular merchants — the butcher counters with their house-made sausage, the provolone hanging in deli windows, the bakeries pulling trays from the oven — run at full tilt. Expect roast pork, sausage sandwiches with broccoli rabe and sharp provolone, arancini, zeppole dusted in powdered sugar, sfogliatelle still warm from the case. The cooking smells alone make the walk from Washington Avenue to Wharton Street worth the trip.
The festival is free, it is crowded, and it is unapologetically neighborhood. Come hungry, come on foot, and arrive early enough to work the whole length of the Market before the afternoon crowds thicken. This is the one day the street performs itself out in the open — and it performs very well.
la cronologia- Late 19th–early 20th centurysouthern Italian immigrants settle the 9th Street blocks
- Annual, MayItalian Market Festival weekend