Italian peasants lived in crowded villages and towns, where housing conditions were poor and cramped and water was often available only from the town fountain. One observer noted:

The dwellings of the Sicilian peasants are little more than hovels. They usually have only one room, often windowless, or lighted only by the door, for windows are a luxury in Sicily; good glass is very expensive and cheap glass cracks in the hot sun. The floor is of worn stone, the walls are rudely plastered and the only heat in winter comes from the small charcoal brazier that is used in preparing the food....But the Sicilian peasants have learned the art of living out of doors. The street is their drawing room.

Bread, the main staple of the Southern Italian peasant diet, satisfied all of these needs. Crusty, heavy loaves of bread made from coarse maize, wheat, rye or barley flour provided the inexpensive backbone of daily meals. Bread was baked once or twice a week in ovens outside the doors of homes, where women could socialize as they worked. A woman from Basilicata, a region which sent many immigrants to Chicago's river wards, recalled that hired hands on a large landholding began the day with a breakfast of bread and cheese, followed by the walk to distant fields and a break for bread and bacon. At ten o'clock, bread, cheese, and peppers were eaten and at four, bread, cheese, and wine. Bread might be supplemented by macaroni, prepared at home or purchased in a wide array of shapes and sizes, but even this basic food was often beyond the income of many peasants. In the North, cornmeal, cooked as polenta, was more common and one writer noted, “To the ill-fed peasant it gives a sense of repletion, and he will eat it by preference even when better food is available."[8]

Meat was a rarity, seen only on Sundays or holidays. When available, it was often preserved with spices and made into sausages, since the cost of salt was so prohibitive. In 1901, Bolton King reported the average yearly consumption of meat by Italians at 25-39 lbs. per person, while that of the average English workhouse pauper was 57 lbs. Whenever possible, small vegetable gardens were cultivated. James Whelpy wrote of the Italian peasant, “what he can dig from the ground is generally the limit of his bill of fare.” Legumes, greens, peppers, onions, and potatoes were common. Vegetables were eaten fresh or as the basis of minestre, a thick vegetable soup, which formed the other staple of peasant diets. Soups could be made in one pot and simmered all day allowing women to work in the fields or do housework at home. Meals were sometimes accompanied by homemade wine, often watered down for consumption by the entire family. Goat's milk was drunk only by children, or the very ill, and cow and sheep's milk was generally made into cheese.[9]

Not all Italians, of course, lived and ate identically. Coastal areas supplemented their diets with a wide variety of seafood including devil fish, squid, cuttlefish, octopus, shark, and porpoise. City dwellers benefited from the variety which better transportation allowed and from slightly higher wages. Cooked foods could often be purchased from the numerous vendors who roamed the streets of towns and large villages.  Fruits and vegetables varied from region to region and even town to town. “The Northern group know as little about the foods of the central and seacoast groups as they do of their dialects, and vice versa,” reported a dietician at the Boston Dispensary.[10]

Class could have as important an effect as geography, however. Artisans' wives in Sicily, according to historian Donna Gabaccia, enjoyed paid household help, extra room for storage, and more variety in their diets, while poorer workers spent more time away from their homes and had less opportunity for shared family meals. A description of a Neapolitan maccaronaro, a vendor of macaroni, suggests the difference class could make in purchased meals: [11]

He has two tall stoves on which stand two ample pots forming the front of his booth at the road side. Standing straight up behind, like an orchestra conductor, is our macaroni man. He wears an apron and holds a long-handled ladle. On his right is a bench with a platter of grated cheese, a large pan of tomato sauce, a pile of bowls, and a wooden box of forks. His customers eat on the spot, the richest take cheese and sauce, others only cheese, while the poorest content themselves with a little water from the pot.[12]

Poverty equalized the diets of the poor. Bread or polenta, soup, vegetables and wine were a typical peasant diet throughout Italy and while starvation might not occur, hunger was chronic. Rosa Casettari, who grew up in Northern Italy and later lived in Chicago said of her childhood:

We were always hungry--me and Catarina and Toni. Sometimes when we thought of those people in front who ate the minestra every day we would run there and look through the iron bars of their gate and see if we could see them--people so rich they could have rice soup every day! ...

Once I heard an old woman in our court telling about a poor widow who was crying and praying all night that God would send her a crust of bread so her children wouldn't starve. In the morning when she got up, there on her table she found a whole loaf of bread--one of those big round loaves of black bread! So then I told Caterina and Toni and we all started praying, asking God to send us something to eat. But we didn't ask for a crust--we asked for a whole loaf for each of us and a bowl full of soup besides. But God knew we weren't starving and He never sent us anything.