Feast of San Gennaro

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Facing south on Mulberry Street during the 2006 Festival.

Street vendors selling sausages at the feast.

The Feast of San Gennaro, originally a one-day religious commemoration, is now an 11-day street fair beginning on the second Thursday in September in the Little Italy area of Manhattan as an annual celebration of Italian culture and the Italian-American community.

Centered on Mulberry Street, which is closed to traffic for the occasion, the festival generally features parades, street vendors, sausages, games and zeppole. The Grand Procession is held starting at 2 p.m on the last Saturday in September immediately after a celebratory Mass at the Church of the Most Precious Blood. This is a Roman Catholic candlelit procession in which the statue of San Gennaro is carried from its permanent home in the Most Precious Blood Church through the streets of Little Italy.

Some residents of Little Italy dislike the noise, garbage, and crowds generated by the festival.^{[citation needed]} Although it is portrayed as a neighborhood event, most of the organizers, vendors, or attendees do not live in the area.^{[citation needed]} For more than a decade, moreover, federal prosecutors have raised concerns that organized crime is involved in running the festival.^[1] New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said all the appropriate steps have been taken to free the festival from such control.

Another festival is held with the same attractions in New York City's other Little Italy, in the Fordham/Belmont community in the Bronx. The streets are closed to traffic and the festivities begin early in the morning and proceed late into the night. In 2002 Jimmy Kimmel and Doug DeLuca founded the Feast of San Gennaro Los Angeles, and is a major annual event held every September in Hollywood.

San Gennaro (Saint Januarius) is the patron saint of Naples, Italy. His feast day is September 19 in the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. The first Feast of San Gennaro was held on September 18, 1926, by newly-arrived Neapolitan immigrants who retained the customary observance from Italy. Similar festivals have also been sponsored in other U.S. cities.

1 Popular culture
2 Gallery
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Popular culture

The Feast of San Gennaro was featured in both The Godfather, Part II and The Godfather, Part III. In Part II, a younger Vito Corleone assassinates local Mafia Don Fanucci during one of the processions made during the festival. This assassination enables Vito Corleone to rise in power and influence in the Mafia. In Part III, Vito's grandson Vincent "Vinnie" Mancini-Corleone assassinates rival Joey Zasa during the festival in a very public manner, causing widespread panic throughout Little Italy. A furious Michael Corleone orders that nothing like that ever be done again.