How Montreal got its Little Italy

The story of how the Italian community settled in Montreal doesn’t start with a corner café with a gleaming La Marzocco machine in the window.

Rather, it begins generations ago, in the 18th century, when a handful of northern Italians showed up as soldiers, traders, and artisans. By the late 1800s, Southern Italian men—mostly young, mostly poor, and mostly on their own—started arriving in waves, chasing hard labour and harder pay: railroad tracks to lay, mines to dig, and forests to fell.

The work was meant to be temporary, but few made the choice to return home, opting instead to stay and start a new life in Montreal. Wives and children followed. Families put down roots.