Federal Hill Columbus Day Festival

Federal Hill announces itself before you reach it: the gateway arch over Atwells Avenue, crowned with the bronze pigna — the pinecone, old-world symbol of welcome and abundance — marking the entrance to one of the most intact Italian-American neighborhoods in the United States.

Federal Hill became Providence's central Italian immigrant neighborhood beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as successive waves of immigrants from southern Italy settled along Atwells Avenue and the surrounding streets, building churches, social clubs, bakeries, and restaurants that gave the neighborhood a distinctly Italian character that has persisted for well over a century even as the city and neighborhood around it changed.