World's second-largest French-speaking city awash in Italian colours - Yahoo! News

World's second-largest French-speaking city awash in Italian colours - Yahoo! News

World's second-largest French-speaking city awash in Italian colours



ALEXANDER PANETTA Sun Jul 9, 6:51 PM ET

MONTREAL (CP) - They danced the tarantella in the streets of Little Italy.
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Male strangers hugged each other and exchanged spontaneous same-sex kisses on the cheek.

A clay Madonna was paraded through a crying, cheering, chanting mob with an Italian flag perched in her saintly hand.

This celebration of soccer supremacy took place right in the heart of the world's second-largest French speaking city: Montreal.

While the city's 70,000 French expatriates and their hundreds of thousands of francophone Quebec supporters were stunned by World Cup defeat, Italians in the city spoke of sweet redemption after a two-decade history of heartbreak.

"I've never been so happy in my life," said Agostino Del Coro. "This is as beautiful as the birth of my son."

His brother Ralph collapsed to the floor in tears and needed to be consoled by his fiancee.

Claudia Guanciale gave her husband a good-natured slap with a flag when he declared his plan to get inebriated.

A Roman Catholic priest strolling through the crowd summed up their sentiments: "Amen."

The jubilant scenes in La Piccola Italia played out just one geographic mile from the city's Latin Quarter - but the emotional chasm spanned a galaxy.

The study in contrasts couldn't be explained by old cliches about Montreal's two solitudes. This was instead a tale of two streets, a pair of adjacent arteries that reflect separate components of the city's soul.

French expats and their supporters dribbled dejectedly from the watering holes on Rue St-Denis - a thoroughfare synonymous with the city's francophone culture.

That sombre procession took place within earshot of thousands of cars blasting their horns en route to a victory celebration on St-Laurent Boulevard - the perennial home of Montreal immigrants, and of Little Italy.

The five-block Little Italy area has long been a rallying point for the city's 225,000-member Italian community, which is barely half the size of Toronto's.

Sunday's World Cup contest was no different as Montrealers of Italian descent travelled from across the island to the old neighbourhood that was home to their great-grandparents before new, Canadianized generations retreated to the suburbs.

A wave of panic crashed over the neighbourhood as TV screens suddenly went blank soon after Italy tied the score in the first half.

Hundreds of frantic soccer fans went scurrying through the streets in search of a functioning set during a 15-minute outage that struck patches of the neighbourhood.

It was markedly less chaotic for most of the afternoon as Italians watched their team tire and steeled themselves for yet another defeat.

But the neighbourhood - which was deflated by losses to the French in 1998 and 2000 - sprang to life after Sunday's penalty-kick win.

Tens of thousands spilled out of every nook of every bar and restaurant in the area, and from the parking lot of a trattoria that installed a giant screen above a makeshift public square.

Just a few decades ago on these streets, Italian housewives would stuff live chickens from the local market into paper bags and carry them - the fowl's feathers still flapping - on city buses for the bumpy ride home.

Their children and grandchildren partied into the night Sunday in this new land of $8 martinis and flavoured lattes, and they raised a glass to the old country.