JOHNSTON – Throughout Italy, very little gets done in August, when most Italians enjoy their ample vacation time. Italian summer holidays reach their zenith with Ferragosto, a festive tradition that can be carbon dated to the pre-Christian Roman Empire. The Catholic Church later incorporated these celebrations to coincide with the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Today, Ferragosto has become to Italy in August what Independence Day is to the United States in July: trips to the beaches or mountains, grand outdoor meals, and colorful fireworks shows.
Italians here in the U.S. don’t venerate the month of August the way their European relatives do. But they come close on Atwood Avenue near the intersection of Plainfield Street in the Town of Johnston, one of the most populous Italian-American communities per capita in this country. There, parishioners like Richard Montella of St. Rocco’s Church have been keeping alive their own special mid-August tradition since the start of the 1940s.
“It’s really like nothing else I’ve ever done,” remarks the 66-year-old Montella, a lifelong Johnston resident and communicant of St. Rocco’s since 1992. His two children, Joseph and Michelle, also attended the church’s adjacent parochial school. “We’re all volunteers, so, the people that are here, want to be here. People of all ages. Cub Scouts, middle school kids, high school students, a lot of alumni volunteer as they get older. Then it’s my generation, people in their 80s and their teens, and everything in between.”
The event that unites these generations is St. Rocco’s annual feast, a week-long tribute to the church’s eponymous saint, whose feast day is observed the third Sunday of every August. It begins with a triduum of evening Masses on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, the third of which concludes with a candlelight procession around the neighborhood.
Thursday through Saturday evening, the church and its school’s spacious grounds host an outdoor celebration featuring homemade food and local beverages, abundant raffle items, and entertainment options for children and families. After Sunday morning Masses, parishioners process through the streets once more, this time carrying a statue and relic of Saint Rocco, before the feast continues through the afternoon and evening.
“The volume of food and drink and games that we go through is staggering,” Montella reveals. “We sell, on average, a giant doughboy every 30 seconds. We’ll go through 4,000 bottles of water, 4,000 meatballs, 1,000 hot dogs, nearly 700 prizes.”
To bring this massive undertaking to fruition each year, Montella spearheads the effort, relying heavily on his contacts and prior work experience as a sales and marketing professional in the food industry. Yet, he’s quick to acknowledge that St. Rocco’s Feast wouldn’t thrive – or even occur – without the more than 200 volunteers who donate their time and talents each August and throughout the yearlong preparations.
After every feast ends, he and the volunteers meet in September to review their financial results, because, yes, Montella concedes, the feast is a vital fundraiser for the church. In October, they start booking the entertainment and reserving other resources for the next year’s feast. By Halloween, St. Rocco’s Women’s Guild – “We call them the holy rollers!” laughs Montella – is already well underway hand-rolling the 100,000 paper straws that serve as the feast’s bespoke raffle tickets. Come January, volunteers begin meeting on a monthly basis, or as needed, to continue finalizing all remaining details.
Yet, according to Montella, the feast means much more to St. Rocco’s than dollars and cents. “I think Italians in general,” he observes, “we follow our faith, and that’s why we’re here. To have a good time, sure, but also, we teach in a Catholic school, we live a Catholic life, we maintain those values throughout, and that’s very important. We want to keep that alive as other people change with technology, with cell phones and social media. We still like to keep loyal to our roots. We want to meet people.
“Obviously,” he adds, “the most important thing is to come to Mass. But there’s more to it. Building that community, getting that face-to-face time with all of our visitors, talking to them and getting to know them. Year after year, you see the same faces, then you start seeing them in church. So, one can help feed the other.”
Montella and his team work equally hard to feed their visitors’ stomachs without starving their wallets. “Volunteers really are the backbone of the event,” he emphasizes. “That’s what allows us to be so affordable. You can feed a family of four here for $20. And we don’t raise prices. We still sell a hot dog for a dollar. All of our water and soft drinks are a dollar, and we’re still making money. We shop around when there are sales, I have a lot of contacts in the industry, and we never compromise quality. That’s how we keep it family-friendly. You could have a sausage-and-pepper, a chicken parm, eggplant, or meatball sandwich – an eight-inch grinder – for six dollars.”
And whatever food the volunteers can make themselves, they do so enthusiastically. Montella’s wife, Anna, and her friends, for example, make arancini (fried balls of risotto) using an authentic Italian recipe passed down over generations. Volunteers make most of the pastries in the glass counter at the entrance to the dining tent as well. “Same with the meatballs, the eggplant, the gravy...” adds Montella. “We’ve kept those homemade traditions.”
Stroll through the vast dining tent in the parking lot behind the church and you’ll hear a bell ringing every couple of minutes. Someone else has just won a prize at the straw draw booth, ever popular because visitors can purchase 10 straws for only a dollar. Unfurl the straws and, if any contains a number inside, you win the corresponding prize.
With its 2026 edition now in the books, St. Rocco’s has hosted 86 annual feasts with just one interruption, in 2020, due to pandemic-fueled restrictions. Montella and Company were overjoyed that this year’s opening Thursday night attracted the largest Day 1 turnout in the feast’s history. Next month, they’ll take a full inventory before beginning work in earnest on the 2027 feast.
“It keeps getting bigger,” he points out. “We’re always looking for ways to improve, whether it’s expanding the menu or the straw draw, while making sure we also maintain those roots of how things are done. We need the youth to get involved, and some of these kids really are a godsend when they come help. Then they learn the tradition and hopefully carry it on. It’s important to keep those traditions alive, to keep that faith alive.”
Keeping watch over it all, St. Rocco himself. By his side sits a faithful dog, a loaf of bread in his jaws. This large statue portrayal of the inseparable pair stands on a pedestal near the front of the dining tent. Fr. Giacomo Capoverdi, St. Rocco’s new pastor since July, explains the iconography’s significance.
“Saint Rocco roamed around Italy as a Third Order Franciscan healer who cured many people of the bubonic plague, before he finally contracted it. He went into the woods, found a little cave and a brook, and was just going to quarantine himself to die. A dog all of a sudden appeared with a loaf of bread in its mouth and gave it to him. He ate it. This dog came every day at the same time with a loaf of bread for Rocco, and he eventually became healthier and stronger. The dog’s owner, a wealthy landowner, followed the dog one day and found Rocco in the cave. The owner took Rocco into his home and helped him continue his recovery. He was cured of the plague.”
Today, St. Rocco’s Church offers fresh bread as a thank-you gift to everyone who joins in the Sunday procession of the statue. Like the loyal dog who wouldn’t give up on Rocco, the people of this community keep coming back to the feast year after year, a testament to their commitment to faith, to tradition, and to one another.
