Uniontown to host Italian festival
People taking part in the 22nd Fayette Italian Heritage Festival in downtown Uniontown this Sunday will find pizza, pizza and more pizza, in addition to other homemade Italian foods, live bocce tournaments, an espresso caf? and many other Italian ethnic favorites. The festival, sponsored by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, Order Sons of Italy in America, will feature music performed by Frankie Capri, Egidio Faiella and the Rocky Chirchiglia Band throughout the day.
However, festival coordinator Ron Romeo said this year’s special attraction will be the U.S. Pizza Team. The team, whose members have appeared on local and national television shows, will perform an acrobatic dough-tossing show on the Main Street stage at 4 p.m. and will also instruct the public in pizza dough workshops throughout the day.
Romeo said Steve and Linda Green, publishers of Pizza Marketing Quarterly magazine, founded the U.S. Pizza Team in 2000 in an effort to bring publicity to the pizza industry.
Since the team’s conception, members have won three gold medals for dough stretching, fastest pizza maker and pizza dough tossing; a silver medal for the best tasting pizza; and a bronze medal for the largest dough stretch. The team won all of the medals in Italy while competing in the World Pizza Championship.
Romeo said he is confident the team will put on a good show.
“It’s going to be pretty interesting,” he said.
Some 5,000 to 6,000 people are expected to take part in this year’s festivities, Romeo said, after 3,000 to 4,000 attended last year.
“We’ve been getting phone calls from people all over the place who are interested in seeing the pizza team or joining the bocce tournament,” he said.
Romeo said 12 pre-registered bocce teams will take part in a single-elimination tournament that will begin at 2 p.m. next to the State Theatre Center for the Arts on Main Street.
“The teams are coming from all over the place,” he said. “I think the competition’s going to be pretty intense.”
Romeo said the Uniontown Sons of Italy, District 11, held the first Italian Festival in 1980 in order to raise money to build a new lodge.
Romeo said the former lodge had collapsed in the winter of 1979.
“We basically lost everything and had no money to rebuild or relocate, and we needed income to bring our lodge back into existence, so we decided to start a festival patterned after the Italian Festival that people had organized in Clarksburg, W.Va.,” he said.
The local lodge sponsored the festivals for about 20 years, and then decided to quit holding them.
After a four-year hiatus, Romeo said, he decided to bring the festival back to Uniontown, and said he was happy the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, which encompasses the Uniontown, Connellsville, Brownsville, Perryopolis and Fairchance area, decided to sponsor the event completely this year.
Romeo said net proceeds from this year’s festival will go toward next year’s event, which he hopes will last two days, but said the Sons of Italy plan on eventually using the proceeds to establish more scholarships.
He said the Grand Lodge gives out about 35 scholarships a year, and the Uniontown Sons of Italy awards one per year.
“Our intentions are to make this festival bigger and better every year, and to eventually use the proceeds to be able to award more scholarships and give away money to local charities,” he said.