That's Amore! San Diego's Little Italy Walking Tour

San Diego's Little Italy sells itself as a polished Instagram backdrop, but its streets hide a far grittier past. On this walking tour, you'll find out how a working-class fishing village survived internment orders, a freeway, and gentrification. You'll also hear how tuna fishermen and their families built the neighborhood's soul from scratch.

The tour starts beneath the Little Italy sign on India Street and winds past Filippi's Pizza Grotto, where a market still conceals an old-school dining room in back. You'll pass Piazza Basilone, dedicated to a WWII Medal of Honor recipient, before heading into the neighborhood's quieter residential streets, where Victorian cottages hint at the multi-generational households that once packed these blocks.

Along the way, you'll learn how wartime paranoia banned Italian fishermen from their own waterfront, and how a wrecking ball sliced the community in half to build Interstate 5. You'll stop at Amici Park's bocce courts and the relocated Amici House, once home to a fisherman known simply as The General. You'll also see Our Lady of the Rosary, funded nickel by nickel by tuna fishermen. The tour ends at the fountain in Piazza della Famiglia, a modern plaza built on the site of the old neighborhood's social life.

On this 45-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Peek inside the San Diego Firehouse Museum, built in 1915 to protect the wooden houses and canneries from fire
• Spot Queenstown Public House, a New Zealand-themed pub hiding inside a preserved 1890s Craftsman home
• Discover how Amadeo Giannini's loans to immigrant fishermen eventually grew into Bank of America
• Learn how a Rooftop Cinema Club turned an unassuming building into a sunset movie destination
• Hear how the Blessing of the Fleet procession once marched from church doors straight to the waterfront
• Find out why a handful of stubborn families refused to abandon the neighborhood after the freeway's destruction

By the time you reach the fountain, you'll understand why Little Italy's charm runs far deeper than its pasta.