Lasagna, homemade paninis and traditional grape stomping return to Southeast Portland this weekend as the Italian Festival of Portland sets up at St. Philip Neri Catholic Church for its two-day run on Saturday, August 22, and Sunday, August 23. Organizers describe the gathering as a celebration of Italian food, music and family, and this year it comes with a catch: tickets are limited, and the church is urging people to buy ahead rather than risk getting shut out at the gate.
Advance tickets run $7 online and $10 at the gate, according to St. Philip Neri Catholic Church, with online sales structured to close the Friday night before the event opens. As KATU reports, festival representative Greg Demaestri has been helping promote the event, which features vendor booths, beer gardens, wine gardens and a dedicated children's play area alongside the food stalls. Traditional pasta, Italian desserts and bocce games round out the grounds, and organizers are billing the live music lineup as a mix of national and local artists.
A Headliner and a Capacity Cap
Italian-American singer Biagio is set as the festival's headlining performer for the weekend, according to the church's social media promotion ahead of the event. Festival executive committee members Tony La Stella and Fr. Andrew Thomas made the rounds on KOIN 6 and KATU in mid-August to talk up the food, music and the festival's limited gate capacity, with organizers stressing that advance tickets are recommended this year. Fr. Andrew Thomas, who represents the festival alongside Demaestri, has helped lead the outreach push heading into the weekend.
Travel Portland's official visitor listing pegs the hours at 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. on Sunday, positioning the festival as an anchor attraction along Southeast Portland's Division and Clinton corridor. The event takes place at St. Philip Neri Catholic Church, located at 2408 SE 16th Ave., and the church maintains an official website for ticket purchases and event details.
A Parish Built for Portland's Italian Immigrants
The festival's host site carries more than a century of Italian heritage behind it. St. Philip Neri Catholic Church was founded in February 1912 after Portland Archbishop Alexander Christie invited the Paulist Fathers to establish a parish serving the city's Italian immigrant community, which numbered roughly 2,000 residents in the 1910 U.S. Census, according to the parish's own history. The founding congregation initially held services inside the living room of a local Italian family's home on Division Street before the parish grew into a formal church.
The current sanctuary, consecrated in 1950, was designed by Italian-born architect Pietro Belluschi, a pioneer of Northwest Regional Modernism who emigrated from Italy and became one of Oregon's most influential mid-century architects, per Restore Oregon. The Paulist Fathers guided the parish for 104 years before formally ending their pastoral leadership in June 2016 due to declining national clergy numbers, handing administrative care to the Archdiocese of Portland; Archbishop Alexander Sample presided over a farewell Mass for the order that same month.
Housing Project Reshaping the Church Campus
The parish grounds have also become a site of local housing policy in recent years. In 2021, Catholic Charities of Oregon and St. Philip Neri Parish advanced plans for a 50-unit affordable housing project on church property, according to Next Portland. The plan called for adaptively reusing the parish's original 1913 church building for 13 housing units while preserving the 1950 Belluschi sanctuary, part of a broader city initiative encouraging housing development on faith-owned land.
The festival grounds sit within the Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood, an area historically shaped by early 20th-century streetcar lines and early Italian-American residential settlement near Ladd's Addition. The surrounding neighborhood contains several designated historic landmarks dating to Portland's streetcar era, connecting the festival's church setting to a broader pattern of immigrant community-building on Portland's east side.
Statewide, Italian heritage remains a notable thread in Oregon's population. Roughly 3.1% of Oregon residents, or about 125,000 people, self-report Italian ancestry, according to U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data compiled by Statistical Atlas, placing Italian among the top self-reported European heritage groups in the state. For festival organizers, that broader demographic backdrop underscores why an event rooted in a single Southeast Portland parish continues to draw crowds each August.
