On a bright evening during the quarantine, my family and I went down to Wooster Square in New Haven, to eat pizza from the box in the sun. This historic district is the Little Italy of a city which apparently has the highest proportion of Italian-Americans of any U.S. city - more than 20 percent. 

We ate our pizza on a granite table in the square itself dedicated to Luisa DeLauro, mother of our current Congresswoman, Rosa DeLauro, who was born and raised in Wooster Square. We got the pizza on Wooster Street from a small, Neapolitan establishment, rather than one of the Hall-of-Famers, Sally’s or Frank Pepe, which are increasingly famous for its New-Haven style of pizza, with its flat, crisp crust, and its funny oblong shape. Aside from the pizzerias, every business on Wooster was closed.

At the Neapolitan place I spoke Italian to the pizzaiolo, who grew up in Naples in a family of Albanian immigrants. Some paisan of his was the lone diner, and we all chatted very pleasantly until my order was ready, and I went off, feeling proud of myself, taking in the slivers of Italian life that burst from little corners of the square. When I opened the pizza box, the order was wrong, but I ate it anyway, with sunglasses on.   –J