Espresso bars from the 1950s, a street that fills when Italy plays, and some of the best restaurants in the city on the blocks around it.
Toronto has one of the largest Italian populations of any city outside Italy — around half a million people of Italian descent in the metropolitan area, the result of very heavy migration between about 1950 and 1970, largely from the south and from Friuli.
College Street between Bathurst and Ossington is the historic Little Italy, though the community long ago spread north and west — St Clair West is the second Corso Italia, and Woodbridge and Vaughan in the suburbs hold far more Italian-Canadians than College Street now does.
The cafés
The espresso bars are the survival. Bar Diplomatico has had a patio on College since 1968. Riviera Bakery, Sicilian Ice Cream and Cafe Diplomatico are the names people give.
They are cafés in the Italian sense — coffee, a sandwich, a television, and men who have been coming for forty years.
The football
When Italy plays a major tournament, College Street is where a very large number of people watch it, and when Italy wins, the street fills with cars flying flags and the police close it.
In 2006, when Italy won the World Cup, the celebration on College Street ran most of the night and is still referred to.
Eating
The restaurants on College itself are a mix — some genuinely good, some coasting on the address.
The better eating has moved to the surrounding streets: Ossington Avenue one block west is one of the densest and best restaurant strips in Toronto, and Dundas West, Harbord Street and Palmerston all have serious kitchens.
For Italian specifically, the traditional recommendation is to go north to St Clair West or out to Woodbridge, where the food is aimed at the community rather than at visitors.
Around it
Palmerston Boulevard, running north from College, is lined with gas lamps and mansions and is one of the prettiest streets in the city.
Bickford Park and Christie Pits — the latter the site of the Christie Pits riot of 1933, when a baseball game between a largely Jewish team and a largely Anglo one erupted after a swastika banner was displayed, producing six hours of street fighting. There is a plaque.
Kensington Market is a fifteen-minute walk east.
Practicalities
Streetcar 506 runs the length of College. Christie or Ossington stations on Line 2 are a ten-minute walk north.
Evenings and weekends are when the street works. Summer patios open from about May.
More Food & Drink
St Lawrence Market
A market since 1803, in a building wrapped around the old city hall, and the peameal bacon sandwich is not optional.
The Danforth and Greektown
Two kilometres of Greek restaurants along Danforth Avenue, and a food festival in August that closes the road.