I have spent my life in this corner. Sometimes when I spend a lot of time working in the back and my customers don’t see me in the store, they get worried. When I arrived in the 1950s it was all countryside, there was no other store but only orange and lemon trees, just like in Sicily.”

The corner Rosario Mazzeo is talking about is the one between Lake Ave and Mountain St in Pasadena, where in 1960, in his early twenties, he helped his uncle expand Roma Market, a deli of Italian products that over the years has become a landmark for the many lovers of the food from the Belpaese.