Earlier this year, the Star told the Story of Nick and Mary Pascale, a young couple photographed on Corso Italia in 1970.

The photo, which had become family lore in the intervening 49 years, was never published until this year. It had been snapped by photographer Bob Olsen who was walking along St. Clair W. and College St. that summer to illustrate a story about Toronto’s burgeoning Italian community.

Only a few of Olsen’s photos ever ran in the paper, and when a handful were published alongside Nick and Mary’s story earlier this year, many Star readers were surprised to see themselves, parents and grandparents in those sun-drenched images.

They shared their stories — and how their relatives came to Toronto — with the Star.

Nicola (Nick) Ventivolpe loved those roses.

He lived in that red brick house on Henderson Ave. for most of his life. When Bob Olsen walked around the College St. neighbourhood in 1970 and snapped his photo, Nick was doing what he usually did — sitting in the front yard, admiring his roses, chatting to the neighbours. He was 88 then, and had been a widower for more than 30 years.

While many Italians had relocated to Toronto after the Second World War, Ventivolpe left his small town in southern Italy in 1907. Looking for a better life, he arrived in Toronto that year, says his granddaughter Marie Santo. He worked as a labourer and moved where the work took him, to Hamilton, New Brunswick, Boston and Rhode Island, often making between $1 and $2 a day. His wife, Maria, joined him in the U.S. around 1910 and worked at a cotton factory, but she became sick and in 1911 they both returned to Italy for a stretch before both settling in Toronto for good in 1913.

That year, they bought the house on Henderson Ave. for $2,400. Nick worked in construction and the house was paid off in 1919. The couple had five children. A son died in infancy, and then came four daughters, and, eventually, five grandchildren.

Maria died in 1938, when their oldest daughter was 19 and the youngest was 11. Nick never remarried. He raised his girls and continued working for a paving company. When he retired in 1948, he had more time to putter around the garden. He made his own wine and enjoyed the odd brandy. Nick stayed in his house with one of his daughters into his late 90s, when a fall led to a broken hip and a nursing home. He died in 1983, 101 years old.

Santo couldn’t believe it when she saw her grandfather in the pages of the Star. She remembered that house well — it had been in the family for the better part of a century, and when she was a little girl in the 1950s, she remembered her grandfather still had an old-fashioned toilet with a chain.

“I was so shocked when I saw the picture,” she says. “Am I dreaming? What is my grandfather doing in the Star?

Nicola Lippa, dressed in a suit, was likely taking a breather from the pasta factory when Bob Olsen took this photo.

Lippa enjoyed the cafe culture at La Sem, a bar and patisserie well-loved by the local Italian community on the south side of St. Clair W. at St. Clarens Ave. The cappuccino was good, and so was the chatter about politics and sports.

Lippa loved to listen to other people’s stories. He arrived in Toronto in 1956, with his wife and two daughters. Nicola’s father had been a sculptor, well known for local monuments and gravestones. Canada needed bricklayers, and so Nicola borrowed money from a family in his hometown who owned a travel agency so his family could start over in Toronto.

“We did the same thing that other immigrants are doing now, three families in one home,” remembers his daughter Lisa Buccheri, who was 5 when they left Italy.

People from their hometown of Villavallelonga in central Italy typically went to Rochester or Toronto, depending on where their relations were. The Lippas landed in New York and took the train to Toronto. Lisa remembers how they were not allowed to open the windows.

“My mother would tell the story: They were afraid that we would leave and hide in the states, so the Americans made sure the windows did not open,” she says. “We were so hot but they wouldn’t let us out until we got to our destination.”

At first, her father worked as a bricklayer, and then the family opened a small corner grocery store. They lived frugally and bought a house near Rogers and Caledonia Rds., and Nicola’s brother came to live with them. By the early 1960s, Lippa and a business partner opened up the San Remo pasta factory in the west end of Toronto, making packaged dry pasta that sold in Toronto and the U.S.

By 1970, when this photo was taken, Lippa had sold the corner store, and the family had moved to the Lawrence Ave. and Keele St. neighbourhood. He still had the pasta factory and he hired Italian newcomers, helping them get a start in Toronto. He loved a good coffee break in the middle of the day, if he could get away. He could often be spotted in a suit, smoking a cigarette and sipping espresso.

“It’s like Cheers, where everyone knows your name,” Buccheri said. As the years went on, competition in the pasta market became more intense and San Remo struggled. “He worked so hard,” his daughter said, remembering how her father regularly woke up at 3 a.m. to drive to the factory to make sure the dryer was on and the pasta wasn’t getting mouldy.

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Her father always told her that she could do whatever she wanted to do in life, and when that meant university he was there.

“I was the first person going to university in my family, and it was a struggle for them,” she says. “But that’s what he taught us, we could be who we want and do what we wanted to do, like what he did.”

He was too proud to go bankrupt, so when it became clear there was no way forward, he closed the factory and sold whatever he could. It allowed him to return to his passion, and in 1980 he spent many months in Calgary, working as a mason, building intricate stone fireplaces. That’s when he became sick. It was lung cancer.

He died in Toronto in the 1980s, 63 years old.

“They worked so hard but they did love it,” Buccheri says of her parents. “After a while, they didn’t really think they were missing out on Italy. My parents really loved Canada.”

Antonio (Tony) Codeluppi’s daughter laughed when she enlarged the photo of her father, and saw that the men on the patio of La Sem were looking at a World Cup photo of the Brazilian and Italian teams.

“I’m sure they were discussing soccer because that’s what they always did,” Elisabeth Ciavarella says. (In 1970, Brazil bested Italy 4-1 in the World Cup final.)

Her father was a professional soccer player in his younger years in northern Italy, a fast midfielder. “Right until a few days before he died, he’d be the fastest walker of all of us, we couldn’t keep up with him,” she said.

Back then, the careers weren’t as long as they are now, she says, so by his late 20s, her father was working for a car company. When the company relocated to Windsor, Ont., her dad came to Canada. As he crossed the Atlantic Ocean, he heard that Toronto had a big Italian community worth checking out. He liked it so much he decided to stay, and the next year his wife, Luciana, and daughter joined him. Another daughter was born in Canada, and he soon had a job as a coach for the Toronto Italia professional soccer club.

“They snatched him up right away,” Ciavarella says, noting that her father also learned a trade and became an electrician. As a soccer coach, he was a “great believer in fundamentals and conditioning,” an old team program from 1961 reads. “He has a keen sense of player evaluation and is always on the lookout for innovations which can lift the team and provide spirited soccer for the fans.”

After he coached Toronto Italia, he coached smaller clubs as a “hobby,” and continued to work as an electrician. Every morning he was out the door by 6:30 a.m., and home by 5 p.m. for dinner. If he was lucky, it was pasta, his evergreen favourite.

After dinner, there was a shower, maybe a nap, and then out to St. Clair W. in his well-tailored suit to meet his friends at La Sem, the staple of social life on the street. When the La Sem photo was taken, the family was living in an apartment above a photo studio a few stores down the block. They had moved back to Italy in 1965 to see if the economic situation had improved, but it hadn’t, so they returned to Toronto. Eventually they bought a house on Silverthorn Ave., where Ciavarella’s parents grew old. Her father died in 2006, and her mother in 2014.

Ciavarella had never seen this photo of her father before. She was reading the Star story about Corso Italia earlier this year and saw him sitting there, talking soccer.

“It was so emotional, I nearly fell off the chair,” she says. “I thought, ‘oh my God where did this come from?’ I was just shocked. It was so lovely.”