Italian Village

The History

In 1927, Alfredo Capitanini — an immigrant from Lucca, in the Tuscany region of Italy — opened a restaurant at 71 W Monroe Street in Chicago's Loop. He didn't just open an Italian restaurant; he built an Italian village inside a downtown office building. The dining room was designed to recreate the experience of eating outdoors on a warm Mediterranean night: stucco walls painted to look like village facades, wrought iron balconies jutting from upper stories, archways leading to intimate alcoves, and above it all, a ceiling painted deep blue with tiny lights that twinkled like stars. When you walked through the door, you left Chicago behind.

The restaurant opened during Prohibition, just two years before the stock market crash, and in the same city where Al Capone ruled. It survived all of it. Legend holds that Capone himself was a patron during those early years — the restaurant's 1927 opening placed it squarely in the peak of his power. Through the Great Depression, World War II, and every economic downturn that followed, the Capitanini family kept the doors open and the stars twinkling. The restaurant became a fixture of Loop life, the place where Chicago's business community took clients, celebrated occasions, and returned generation after generation.

Now in its fourth generation of family ownership, Italian Village has grown into a complex of three restaurants occupying the same building. The Village — the original room with the famous starlit ceiling — serves classic Italian-American fare. Vivere offers upscale modern Italian cuisine in a dramatically designed space. La Cantina specializes in seafood and wine. Together they represent nearly a century of one family's commitment to a single address, a single vision, and a single enchanting ceiling.

What Made It Famous

Walk into The Village dining room at Italian Village and look up. Nearly a century after Alfredo Capitanini first installed them, tiny lights still twinkle against a deep blue ceiling, simulating a starlit Italian night sky. The stucco walls, the wrought iron details, the intimate booth arrangements — it all works together to transport you to a small town piazza at dusk. This theatrical interior design, radical for 1927, has been the restaurant's signature for four generations. Countless diners have looked up at that ceiling on their first visit and felt the same wonder that Capitanini's original customers did.

But Italian Village's fame extends beyond its decor. The restaurant represents the pinnacle of the Italian immigrant experience in Chicago. Alfredo Capitanini arrived from Italy, and rather than simply opening a restaurant, he recreated his homeland inside a Loop office building. His children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have maintained that vision without interruption. In a city where restaurants open and close with brutal regularity, Italian Village's nearly century-long run under the same family is extraordinary. Frank Sinatra dined here when he performed in Chicago. Every mayor from Big Bill Thompson through the present has eaten under those stars. The restaurant has served pre-theater dinners to generations of Chicago theatergoers heading to shows on nearby Randolph Street.

Italian Village also matters as a culinary landmark. When it opened in 1927, Italian food in America was still largely confined to immigrant neighborhoods. Capitanini brought Italian dining to the heart of Chicago's business district, introducing Loop workers and downtown visitors to dishes that many had never encountered. The restaurant helped normalize Italian cuisine in mainstream American dining — a contribution that's easy to overlook now but was genuinely significant at the time. Today, Italian Village stands as Chicago's oldest Italian restaurant and one of the oldest in the entire country.

Key Facts

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