Qualla: West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. In 1979, Joe DiMaggio rode through downtown Clarksburg, West Virginia, in a parade car with Governor Jay Rockefeller on one side and Senator Jennings Randolph on the other. The occasion was the first West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival. The Yankee Clipper was the parade marshal; the singer Jerry Vale gave a free concert that night; eighty thousand visitors poured into a city of fewer than 17,000 residents. The festival was meant as a celebration of the unusually large Italian-American population of north-central West Virginia - the descendants of immigrants who had come a generation or two earlier to work the coal mines, the glass factories, and the natural-gas industry around Clarksburg. The first year worked. The festival has run every Labor Day weekend since (with a partial COVID interruption in 2020) and now draws crowds of more than 100,000 to the same three blocks of Main Street.

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival: Why Clarksburg?

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. The answer to the obvious question - why Italian heritage in West Virginia? - lies in the early twentieth-century immigration patterns of the Appalachian basin. Between 1890 and 1924, the great wave of Italian immigration to the United States deposited unusually large numbers of ...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival: Founding the Festival

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. The festival was conceived in the late 1970s by a small founding board - Louis Spatafore, Sam Chico, Sam D'Annunzio, Frank Iaquinta, James D. Larosa, John Manchin, and Alma Moore - who wanted a public celebration that would both honor the Italian-American heritage of the region a...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival: What Happens on Labor Day Weekend

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. The festival takes over downtown Clarksburg from Friday evening through Sunday night. The street blocks between South 2nd and South 4th Streets along Main Street are closed to traffic; vendor booths fill the streets; stages are set up at multiple locations for live music; and the...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival: The Entertainment Roster

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. Across forty-five years the festival has booked an unusual range of Italian-American and West Virginia entertainers. The 1979 Jerry Vale concert was followed by performances from Tony Danza, Frankie Avalon, Joey Dee and the Starliters, Kathy Mattea, Jo Dee Messina, and Steve Auge...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival: Italian American of the Year

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. Each year the festival recognizes outstanding Italian-Americans with the Italian-American Man and Woman of the Year awards. The lists, going back to 1980, read like a roll call of West Virginia and broader American Italian-American achievement. Joe Manchin, the future governor an...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5

West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival: A Festival That Stayed

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant), CC BY-SA 2.5. Many festivals of the 1970s have faded. The West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival has not. It has expanded steadily over four and a half decades, attracted media attention that occasionally extends beyond regional boundaries, and become one of the events that defines Clarksburg...

Image: Tim Kiser (w:User:Malepheasant) | CC BY-SA 2.5