{"id":282490,"date":"2026-09-09T21:28:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T21:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/282490\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T21:28:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T21:28:12","slug":"50th-la-festa-italiana-draws-more-than-100000-to-downtown-scranton-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/282490\/","title":{"rendered":"50th La Festa Italiana draws more than 100,000 to downtown Scranton"},"content":{"rendered":"

With attendance being well over 100,000 people, the vendors definitely had their hands full all weekend long.<\/p>\n

SCRANTON, Pa. \u2014 The red, white, and green takeover of downtown Scranton is coming to an end.<\/p>\n

Courthouse Square was full of all things Italian since Friday for the annual La Festa Italiana.<\/p>\n

“We went yesterday, last night, and now we’re here this morning,” said Philip and Jeanette Conforti.<\/p>\n

The Confortis made a weekend out of La Festa, visiting from Monroe County. Originally from Brooklyn, they say it’s a little ‘slice’ of home right at Courthouse Square. “We love it; we come every year,” they said.<\/p>\n


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And for the hard-working vendors, they get to share a taste of their food with new people.<\/p>\n

“Being from Luzerne County, being up here in Lackawanna County, we’ve met so many new customers and people, and they said they’re definitely going to be down and visit. They didn’t even know that, you know, we were down there, so that’s really gonna help,” said Francine Arcaro, owner of Arcaro’s the Next Generation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is La Festa’s 50th year, and festival organizers say they saw well over 100,000 people at the event.<\/p>\n

“The big hit this year is the Dubai chocolate strawberry cups. I think we probably did like 600 pounds of strawberries,” said Francine.<\/p>\n

And while La Festa helps restaurants reach new people, it also helps people find a good meal.<\/p>\n

The festival goes until 8 p.m. Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With attendance being well over 100,000 people, the vendors definitely had their hands full all weekend long. SCRANTON,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":["post-282490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}