“Growing up in Los Angeles, there were few mirrors for Italian Americans,” recalls Gatto. Italian Americans are typically assumed to be from the East Coast or Chicago. My family arrived in Los Angeles after settling in Colorado. As a kid I couldn’t understand how I fit in the Southern California mosaic, let alone the Italian American mosaic.”

In the mid-1990s, Gatto learned about a historic building on the edge of downtown Los Angeles that had served as an Italian community gathering place in the early 1900s. “I was floored,” recounts Gatto. “It signified that Italian Americans had a place historically in the city, a history that was never spoken of.”