Shrewsbury Street in Worcester years ago wasn’t just a place for Italian families to hang out – it was the place. It was their home, the birthplace of so many Italian-American children. There was, or so it seemed, an Italian bakery on just about every corner of the street. You couldn’t get through summer without a feast or festival of some sort every month. 

“That’s the way Shrewsbury Street was when I was growing up,” Judy Verdini said recently. “The summer was a big deal to us. Other than we didn’t have to go to school, we knew we had a party every single month. There was something going on.”