The District: Growing Up in Little Italy

In a story that begins just before her birth in 1928, Rose Grieco’s memoir is an intimate and finely detailed portrait of her beloved neighbourhood and the family, friends and neighbours she grew up with. In this respect, it’s also a universal story, familiar to anyone whose parents or grandparents immigrated to a new land and made it all the richer with the customs, recipes and traditions they brought with them. Toronto’ s fashionable Little Italy remains one of Canada’s most renowned Italian-Canadian communities. Rose’s lyrical writing style, along with dozens of evocative photos, brings to life more than fifty years of history in a community where everyone knew everybody.

At eighty-seven years young, Toronto-based Rose Grieco is a mother, grandmother, restaurateur (retired), poet, songwriter, independent publisher, and author. When she closed her restaurant (Mama Rosa’s) in 1993, Rose thought she’d like to write a cookbook inspired largely by her mother’s home cooking. But the more she explored the many facets of her own family’s journey, the more the story began to take a much different direction. (It does, however, include a sampling of some of her mother’s best, and easiest to follow, recipes.) The result, twenty-two years and many rewrites later, is The District: Growing Up in Little Italy , published by her own company, The Gypsy Press.