Italian Picnic and Parade

Sunday morning on Old Highway 49

On the first Sunday in June, at 10:30 in the morning, the Grand Parade of the Italian Benevolent Society of Amador County comes down Main Street in Sutter Creek. Main Street is Old State Highway 49, a two-lane road between raised rock sidewalks. Gold Country residents stake out places along the curb early, and a few watch from turn-of-the-century-style balconies. The Sutter Creek business association’s account of the morning lists giant colored balloons, trays of snow cones, and clowns selling long horns, flags, water guns and cotton candy. The society holds its salami toss the same morning.

Most county residents who are not on the sidewalk, that account says, are in the parade: on a float, in a band, marching with a Boy Scout, Girl Scout or 4-H unit, riding county fire equipment, or “dressed to the hilt on a horse.” The society’s list of 2025 winners shows how wide the field runs. Victory Village took first among floats, and the Witches of West Point won Best Theme over the Sutter Creek Ragtime Festival. The Merced County posse won among sheriff’s posses. The Jackson City Fire Department won with an antique fire truck, and the Shriners Keystone Cops placed second among motorized groups. Other first places went to Terri Harvey for a vintage tractor, Charlie Alamo for Lady Side Saddle, and Michael Masuda among candidates for local office. The Sutter Creek Elementary Kindness Club led the junior marchers and Jazzy Legacy the senior ones. Preston Castle took the category called Unique. The Director’s Award went to Twin Cedar Pupperoni’s Quite Not So Precision Drill Team and the Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp.

The parade runs south toward the edge of town. A Ledger Dispatch caption from 2011 shows the entries heading down Main Street toward the Italian Picnic Grounds at Sutter Hill. Anyone with a car, the town’s page says, can join in by following the pooper-scoopers behind the last entry about a mile up the hill to the grounds.

The grounds on Sutter Hill

The picnic grounds sit at 581 Highway 49. The society gives them as 20 acres, with a recreation hall of 8,500 square feet on one page of its website and 8,600 on another. There are three bocce courts, a lawn with a band stand, an outside pavilion, and a beer barn large enough for dancing. A 2022 schedule placed the bands at a gazebo, in the beer gardens and in the dinner hall.

The 2026 picnic was the 144th, held June 5 through 7. The town’s page calls Friday kids’ night. The society sold reserved tickets for a beer and wine tasting that evening. Its post the next morning reported “a great turnout, music, food, bingo, dancing, beer and wine,” along with society merchandise and other vendors.

Saturday is the dinner, and the two descriptions differ. The town’s page promises an “All-You-Can-Eat Spaghetti and Chicken Feed” at 6 p.m. The society’s 2026 notices name a Chicken & Ravioli Dinner in the hall, with cocktails at 6, dinner at 7, and tickets at $45. On Sunday, after the parade, the society serves a tri-tip and pasta barbecue lunch from noon to 2. A bocce tournament runs Sunday afternoon. Through the rest of the weekend a game of bocce costs a buck.

Around all of this run carnival rides, games, food stands, vendors, bingo and dancing to live bands. Jack Mitchell, publisher of the Ledger Dispatch in Jackson, has written that the picnic is one of his favorite events, “not just because of the salami you can win at bingo.” The rides are not certain every year. In 2022, for the 140th picnic, the society announced there would be no carnival “due to unfortunate circumstances with Johnson Brothers Amusement,” while every other event went ahead. That year’s Friday tasting poured more than 20 wines, beers and olive oils. Saturday began with a spaghetti eating contest for all ages. Manny Sosa played the gazebo on Friday evening, and the Trucco Accordion Duo played the dinner hall during Sunday lunch. A 2016 photograph in the paper’s archive carries the caption: “Alyssa Konvalin may have lost the Spaghetti Eating Contest but she ultimately stole the entire show.”

A hotelkeeper from Richmond

The society describes itself as the oldest independent Italian club in the United States. It says it was established in 1881 as a charitable institution to aid the families of Italian miners in the Amador County gold mining country. Its name then was the Societa di Unione e Beneficenza Italiana. How it came to be is less settled. The local historian Larry Cenotto took up the question in his 1981 centennial booklet, which the Ledger Dispatch has reprinted. He wrote that the county newspapers gave no history of the society, and that copies of the San Francisco Italian papers that reported on it no longer exist. “What we do know about the founding and founders comes from secondary or more suspect sources,” he wrote.

The main account comes from Pietro Giurlani, the society’s longest-standing member. Giurlani joined in 1897, at 28, and in 1949 he told his story to Dick Harris of the Sutter Creek News. He had heard it from older members. In his telling, Ben White, also known as Bianchetti, came to Amador County from Richmond, Virginia, in 1879 to run the Amador Hotel in Amador City, later called the Imperial. He lived in Jackson for a year or more while the hotel was finished. In January 1881 he mentioned a society he had belonged to in the East. Its object was to care for sick members who could not work, to pay them enough to get by, and “in case of death, to provide a fitting burial.” He secured a copy of the Virginia society’s charter and “got together a group of 33 business and professional men of Italian ancestry.” Prominent among them, Giurlani said, were Alfonso Ginocchio, D.B. Spagnoli, Julius Chichizola, Anthony Caminette and Bianchetti himself.

The other versions do not agree. Sheriff U.S. Gregory spoke at the celebration in 1908. He said the society was organized on April 1, 1881, and had “62 charter members.” Six of them were still on the roster that year: Ginocchio, Andreas Basso, B. Bianchetti, Domenico Fenile, Giovanni Gereghini and Lorenzo Marre. The program for the 1951 picnic repeated Giurlani’s statement almost word for word, with one change. The five men he had called prominent among the 33 became the co-founders themselves. “Since then, we suppose,” Cenotto wrote, “tradition has considered them cofounders.”

Cenotto added details from his own research. After the fire of 1878, Benjamin Sanguinetti, Bianchetti’s brother-in-law, rebuilt his Amador City hotel in brick. It was finished by October 1879, and Bianchetti moved his family over from Jackson to manage it. In March 1880 a party of “aristocratic citizens and leading Italians of Jackson” visited Amador City: Spagnoli, L.J. Fontenrose, A. Caminetti, J.A. Wagon and L. Costa. Fontenrose was county clerk and Caminetti was district attorney. Cenotto asked whether they came on county business or to talk about forming a society. He also noted that men in Jackson had organized a Garabladina Society 15 or more years earlier. In his view, Bianchetti did not bring something entirely new to the county.

The society was formed in March or the spring of 1881, with headquarters in Amador City. The two-story Knights of Pythias hall there, completed the same year, served as its meeting place for many years. Cenotto suggested the reason for choosing Amador City: perhaps more Italians lived north of Sutter Creek and worked in the mines there. By late May the society had adopted a constitution. The Dispatch of May 28, 1881, reported: “Our Italian friends of this county have organized a mutual benevolent society to meet in Amador City once a month. Their object is solely to aid such of their members as many may become sick and distressed and bury those who may die in destitute circumstances.”

From Jackson to the fiftieth

Tradition holds that the first picnic was held in Jackson, most likely a private, informal affair for members only. The town’s page dates the picnic and parade to 1882. The fiftieth annual celebration came in 1931 and drew what may have been the largest crowd in its history. Among those present was Governor James Rolph Jr., the first governor of California to attend. In 2006 the society marked its 125th year.

In December 2023 John Queirolo gave the Ledger Dispatch a photograph of the picnic that had never been published. The back reads:

Anthony Camunetti Sr. Italian Picnic September 9th, 1904