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Cincinnati celebrated its first Sacred Heart Italian Dinner in 1910—four decades before the first Skyline Chili opened and 20 years before Buddy LaRosa was born. Automobiles were so rare that neighbors raced out of their houses to gawk when a Model T rumbled down the street.
The Italian dinner at Sacred Heart Church in Camp Washington, in other words, is a Cincinnati tradition with a capital T, serving 210,000 ravioli, 23,000 meatballs, and 600 gallons of sauce to some 2,000 diners and 3,000 carryout customers at its peak. An army of sauce stirrers, meatball makers, and ravioli chefs worked the kitchen into their 80s and beyond. In 1988, Mafalda Marrero told Midwest Living magazine why she’d been volunteering since 1946: “It’s not an obligation; it’s a devotion.”
That level of devotion has been dwindling in recent years, however, as churches and cultural clubs struggle with decreasing membership and fewer volunteers. “People aren’t as connected with their heritage as their parents and grandparents,” says Cincinnati food historian Dann Woellert, author of The Food Etymologist blog. “In the case of Sacred Heart, these are now third- and fourth-generation Italians, and many of their kids have dispersed to other cities.”
All over the region, especially in the urban core, historic churches have morphed into ale houses, community centers, and wedding venues. Even the venerable Italian dinner hasn’t been spared. Organizers have been unable to recruit enough volunteers since the pandemic forced a pause, and as a result they’ve eliminated dine-in and hot carryout options; this year, only frozen boxes of the delectable ravioli and frozen meatballs are being sold. The event now takes place once a year—Palm Sunday, March 24—instead of the past custom of twice-yearly dinners on Palm Sunday and the second Sunday in October. (This year’s event, originally scheduled for April, moved back to Palm Sunday in February.)
“It’s heartbreaking that I can’t get it back to where it used to be,” says co-chair Ron Panioto, who took the event’s reins after the death of his father, Judge Ronald Panioto, in 2022. The elder Panioto had served as dinner co-chair since 1984, during his years on the Hamilton County Domestic Court and Municipal Court.
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Faith and ethnicity have been closely linked since the Catholic Church’s arrival in the U.S., according to Father David Endres, professor of church history at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary. “The original immigrants weren’t promoting their nations of origin and ethnicity so much as just being who they were.”
Civic leaders can’t help worrying what happens to a community once it loses cultural touchstones such as the Italian dinner. “It’s a lot of work and a lot of fun, and it’s a good way to showcase our Italian heritage,” says U.S. Representative Brad Wenstrup (Ohio’s 2nd District), a longtime volunteer at the event. “Imagine if Cincinnati stopped doing Oktoberfest.”
Kevin Luken, president of Cincinnati’s Germania Society, called the Italian dinner “an iconic Cincinnati tradition. It’s a great event, and it would be a shame to lose it.”
A number of forces outside of any single person’s control have conspired to put longstanding community events in jeopardy—demographic shifts, changing attitudes toward volunteering, and a worldwide pandemic being the headliners. No one among the Sacred Heart faithful wants to admit it, but this year’s frozen ravioli sale could be the final Italian dinner.
Only a few years ago, Sacred Heart’s ravioli supper was a ritual as reliable as the Reds Opening Day parade. Instant friendships sprouted up in the lines snaking around the block on Massachusetts Avenue. Customers lugged 5- and 10-quart kitchen pots to load up on carry-out spaghetti or ravioli for their Sunday dinner.
In the other line, diners often waited for more than an hour before being ushered into the inner sanctum of the Sacred Heart cafeteria. The room’s centerpiece is a massive mural depicting Bishop John Scalabrini blessing the migrants—his hand raised in a gesture that seemed to bestow a benediction on the diners crammed into long rows of tables. Volunteers herded guests with the efficiency of air traffic controllers, shouting, “How many places are at that table?” Schoolchildren eagerly ran orders from the kitchen to the tables.
Over the years, local judges and politicians from Charlie Luken to Steve Chabot vied for the honor of serving the meal; it was the place to see and be seen. “As a politician you want to go where there are a lot of people and they see you doing something good for the community,” says Wenstrup. “It’s a way of campaigning, too, let’s not kid ourselves.”
“The drama of it all was part of the fun,” Woellert recalls. “Even if you had to wait in line for an hour, it was worth it for your once-a-year treat of spinach ravioli. We called them little pockets of joy.”
Weeks of preparation led up to each event, requiring dozens of volunteers to prepare the sauce alone. On Italian dinner day itself, a crew of 85 to 100 was needed to serve and cook the meal. Tempers sometimes flared, but a joyful—and not so joyful—noise was all part of the experience.
“It was fighting with the people you love,” says Wenstrup, who is Italian on his mother’s side. “I loved working in the kitchen, with all the yelling back and forth. I felt very connected to my Italian roots.”
Panioto concurs, saying, “The older generation would be arguing like hell, and minutes later they would be sitting at a table eating together.”
It never occurred to Sacred Heart’s tight-knit Italian community that anyone could say no to its call. “My grandfather came from Italy, and it was expected that we would all help out,” says Panioto. “There was such a sense of community among the Italian families, and we came together for Sacred Heart. That was our church.”
His parents’ friend, the late Marlene Nesi, had a genius for sweet-talking folks into signing up. “And she would make calls and raise hell if you didn’t show up,” says Panioto. “To this day I don’t know how my dad and Marlene pulled it off. It took so much cooperation and leaning on volunteers. The kitchen was controlled chaos, with 50 people cooking and cleaning.”
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The Italian dinner seems to be in his family’s DNA. “My father taught me a lot about hard work and what it is to be dedicated,” says Panioto. “It’s in my heart, too, and I wear it on my sleeve. I don’t know how you instill that in kids. You have to want it from within.”
A generational shift has occurred within most of the Italian families he knows. “Our kids don’t have the same sense of identity with their Italian roots, and they have no real interest in volunteering,” he says. “They didn’t all grow up in the same neighborhood like we did. They had to make a special trip to see their aunts and uncles and cousins.”
The same dilemma is facing many churches, fraternal organizations, and cultural clubs throughout the community. “Groups such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Germania Society are trying desperately to make themselves meaningful to 20- and 30-somethings,” says Woellert. “A lot of these communal events already were running on steam, and the pandemic made a lot of people rethink their priorities.”
The Germania Society’s Luken says the pandemic changed everything. “When you can’t do your events for two years, you lose your mojo and you lose people,” he says. “And a lot of people still don’t want to come out, not only because of COVID but because of respiratory illnesses.”
But health concerns perhaps aren’t the biggest challenge in recruiting new members and volunteers. “I don’t think people have a lack of interest so much as a lack of time,” Luken says. “People don’t live the way they did when I was growing up. People have so many things on their plate with sports and extracurriculars. We aren’t any different from a church or a sports club or a fraternal organization—people are just busier, and it’s harder to fi t everything in.”
The Germania Society has innate advantages that go beyond Cincinnati’s visible German heritage. More than 20,000 attend the annual Oktoberfest on the Germania Society’s sprawling 35-acre campus in Colerain Township, not to mention hundreds of thousands who attend Oktoberfest Zinzinnati downtown and similar celebrations in other corners of the region.
Membership in the society has been holding steady at approximately 700, says Luken, and he’s seeing an uptick in interest among young people. “Coming to our events is our best recruitment tool,” he says. “And then it’s our German culture and heritage that draw us together. It’s all about the people and enjoying the camaraderie.”
Sacred Heart Church has been struggling to bounce back from the one-two punch of the pandemic and the loss of Judge Panioto’s leadership. “The older generation was so passionate about it even into their 80s,” says Italian dinner co-chair Ed Rubeo. “We haven’t had anyone in the younger generation step up into leadership. That would have to happen before we tried out the dining option again.”
Some parishioners advise Panioto to take the Field of Dreams approach: Build it, and they will come. He’s too much of a realist for that. “It would be heartbreaking if you made all this product and didn’t have the volunteers to sell it,” he says.
Like his father before him, Panioto is now the sole guardian of the top-secret ravioli recipe that has remained unchanged since Antonio Palazzolo, owner of a pasta and import company, hosted the first Italian dinner in 1910. Palazzolo’s civic-mindedness was never more important than during the Great Depression. “The Italian dinner would raise funds for struggling neighbors,” says Woellert. “Antonio donated both materials and time to help feed the needy in the parish and Camp Washington during the Depression. It was their very own war on poverty.”
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For more than 50 years, the ravioli supper was held at the Sacred Heart Italian Church downtown at 527 Broadway. When the church was bulldozed in 1970 for expansion of Procter & Gamble’s headquarters campus, the tradition—and its Italian community—migrated to another Sacred Heart parish in Camp Washington, which was predominantly German. The Catholic school on the property was closed in order to convert the building into the Italian community hub the downtown church had once been. University of Cincinnati English Professor LaVerne Summerlin knows how it feels to grow up with that sense of community and to see it disappear over the years. She attended Holy Trinity, one of six Catholic elementary schools in her West End neighborhood. Today there are none.
“When we lose our schools and churches, we lose a part of our identity, we lose a part of our foundation,” says Summerlin, author of Gems of Cincinnati’s West End, Catholic Missionaries and Black Children 1940–70. “When some historians write about the West End, they write about the negatives. But when I think about the West End, there were so many good things, especially the support we would get from well-meaning people in our community. On your way to school, you would see the older men sitting in front of a storefront, telling you, Stay in school. That’s lost now. You don’t have that sense of safety or that sense of a network.”
The internet could never replace such a social fabric, says Woellert. “We lose a lot when we lose that in-person aspect of community. We have so few of those multigenerational touch points, gatherings with three or four generations of a family, and they’re so important for a feeling of community. Otherwise we’re just people living among each other. We don’t hear the grandparents talk about the village in Sicily where they grew up or the stories about what Uncle Lorenzo did when he was a kid.”
Hope still remains that the Italian dinner will be restored to its former glory, thanks to the current leadership working so hard to keep the tradition alive in the face of signifi cant challenges. “People miss it, and not just the Italians,” says Wenstrup, who hopes to devote more time to the Sons of Italy and the local Italian community when he retires from Congress at the end of this term. “We would have to do some recruiting and provide training for the new recruits, because you can get scalded very easily back there. We would need a couple of dry runs.”
In the weeks leading up to this year’s frozen ravioli sale, Sacred Heart Church was once again humming with activity. Panioto carefully marked his calendar with important dates: February 17, make and package 91,000 ravioli, nestling 50 raviolis in each box; March 2, prepare around 600 gallons of sauce; March 4, package the sauce in quart containers; March 16, hand roll about 18,000 meatballs to be packaged and frozen on March 18. No detail escaped attention: Rubeo was elated when he found a supplier for the wet wax paper that separates layers of ravioli without sticking.
From 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on March 24—or until they run out—Panioto, Rubeo, and their volunteer paisanos are selling frozen ravioli for $15/box, frozen meatballs for $10 for 10, frozen sauce for $10/ quart, and grated cheese for $8/pint.
The frozen ravioli fund-raiser nets about $30,000 for the Sacred Heart parish. Because of the lower overhead, that’s about the same number as with previous sit-down dinners. But it still feels like an important ingredient is missing.
MINIATURE PHOTOGRAPHS BY PIERRE JAVELLE/MINIMIAM
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