In many cities in the US and Canada like New York City, Cleveland, San Diego, Toronto, Baltimore, etc have neighborhoods named Little Italy. Other cities have neighborhoods that are also essentially Little Italy proxies like North Beach in San Francisco, North End in Boston, Federal Hill in Providence, The Hill in St Louis, Bloomfield in Pittsburgh or La Petite Patrie in Montreal. In these neighborhoods you'll find a high concentration of Italian businesses and Italian pride.

This project aims to create a collection of small Italian businesses you would find in a Little Italy neighborhood. Today you'll probably find more and more corporate chains and non-Italian businesses have moved into these neighborhoods with few of the generational Italian businesses still remaining. But this collection, when fully built out, will allow you to have a commercial corridor that resembles a true Italian centric neighborhood of yester year.

Regarding the buildings I prefer 2 to 4 stories wall-to-wall for any Main Street commercial corridor therefore this collection follows that scale. Even if the real-life business is 1-story and detached I will likely bump it up to 2-3 stories and wall-to-wall or semi-attached corner. I expect most buildings to be 1, 2 or 3 tiles wide.

Occasionally I will group two store fronts onto the same asset so that I can vary the storefront frontage and not always have everything be a uniform multiple of the 8 meter tiles. For instance putting 2 business on a 3 tile wide asset allows me to have some 10 or 12 meter wide wall-to-wall stores. I am going to try to be consistent with setting back the buildings 2 meters from the street to allow you to detail your streets with small sidewalk cafes, bike racks or tree planters.

Not every business will warrant a custom building built to spec. Some will get placed in one of handful of generic building styles and variations I have created. However I will absolutely try to stay true in spirit to the large vibrant commercial signage to capture the full magic of Little Italy.

I play the game more as a plopper and detailer. These assets will be created with that in mind. Is you are more of a zoner they should still work. But I will not be optimizing for the multiple levels of the same buildings.

In the future there will also be props like flags, fire hydrants and other items painted in the Italian flag colors. I also have an idea off in the future for props so that you can stage Festa Italia (Little Italy Festival) in your neighborhood.