Italian Market Festival returns

Judy Faye

by Frank Lewis

Who better than the wizard behind KitchenAid The Book and the Cook to bring back a once enormously popular but lapsed Philly food tradition, the Italian Market Festival?

When the festival returns on May 31 and June 1 after an unplanned five-year hiatus (it was held annually from 1971 to 1997), The Book and the Cook executive producer Judy Faye will deserve much of the credit. The longtime Market-area resident (You could hit my house with an orange, she says) helped broker a deal between Sorrento Cheese, which has made celebrating Italian-American culture part of its marketing strategy, and the Italian Market merchants, who suspended the annual event in '97 due to construction in the area, then weren't able to bring it back.

That made it clear, Faye says, that the festival needed the kind of full-time attention that only corporate underwriting could provide.

The partnership with Sorrento can be traced back about two years, when the company called the Office of the City Representative, which oversees major events, and expressed interest in supporting an Italian-American-themed festival, as it does in its hometown of Buffalo, N.Y., and several other cities. The inquiry was turned over to Faye, who's also executive director of the Center City Proprietors Foundation, which develops marketing events.

It's not that nothing happened [for two years] -- it's taken us this long to work out the details, Faye explains. We were looking for a long-term commitment. So Sorrento signed on for three festivals, with the option of sponsoring more. Faye declined to put a number on the company's support, but said Sorrento and presenting sponsor Commerce Bank had put up respectable sums.

Ninth Street will be closed to traffic between Catharine and Wharton streets both days to make room for a stage (Bobby Rydell will perform June 1 at noon), strolling performers, a kids' Rocky race, the return of the crowd-pleasing greased pole climb and of course, more foods with names ending in vowels than you can shake a braciola at.

More details are available at www.9thstreetitalianmarketfestival.com.