"We're thrilled to bring 'Italian Wannabe' home to South Pasadena," the South Pasadena Arts Council said when it announced the film to The South Pasadenan. "This is more than a film screening. It's a celebration of Bill, Anne, Fiore, and the community they helped create."
The documentary follows Fiore Market Café founder Bill Disselhorst back to the Italian village that inspired the café. Its premiere weekend, November 13 through 16, opens in the building where Fiore served its first lunch in 2010. That building still has a garden café on the corner and an arts gallery around back. The film looks back at a place that, by the map, never left.
A 1925 building on Fremont Avenue
The address is 1000 Fremont Avenue, at the corner of Fremont and El Centro Street. Pasadena Now reported its long history in 2025. The two-story, 12,057-square-foot building went up in 1925 and has been through several lives since:
- 1925. Built as a mortuary.
- Late 1990s. Lissa and James Reynolds bought the property and opened the Fremont Centre Theatre, which they ran as co-artistic directors for nearly 28 years. Ray Bradbury's Pandemonium Theatre Company performed there regularly.
- December 20, 2010. Bill and Anne Disselhorst opened Fiore Market Café on the corner.
- 2024. The South Pasadena Arts Council, known as SPARC, moved into Suite 120. It was the nonprofit's first permanent home since it began as a grassroots effort in 2009.
- 2025. The building sold to a South Pasadena-based private investor. It was fully leased to 22 office, retail and service tenants, and Pasadena Now reported that the new owners intend to continue the Reynolds' legacy.
Most of the building's past uses brought people in to sit for a while: a theater audience, a lunch crowd, and now a gallery opening. The premiere weekend continues that pattern.
What Fiore built on the corner
When the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reviewed Fiore in 2021, it described lunch there as stepping "into a garden at the busy intersection of Fremont Avenue and El Centro Street," with traffic headed for the 110 on the other side of the hedges. The paper's critic noted the café's pride in its bread, its baking classes in rustic loaves, focaccia and baguettes, and the local performers who sometimes played from noon to 1:30 p.m.
The menu wasn't strictly Italian. It had a sopressata sandwich with kalamata olives and blue cheese, roast chicken with basil-walnut pesto and burrata, and a short rib sandwich with Asian slaw. What came from Italy was the pace. The Disselhorsts wrote that they wanted a place "where friends, neighbors, strangers and family come to relax, talk and connect with each other."
SPARC's event page explains where that idea came from. In 2003, Bill and Anne fell in love with "the simplicity, pace, and flavor of Italian life," and that led to Fiore, which became "famous for its hand-made bread, fresh ingredients, and welcoming sense of community."
The garden still serves lunch
Fiore had a new owner before Bill ever left for Italy. Eater LA reported in August 2022 that he had sold the 12-year-old café to Linda Grace, owner of San Marino Cafe nearby. Eater quoted his Instagram post: "I am so grateful that she is the one to carry on the tradition. It's been an amazing run."
The corner now runs as Piccadilly Grace. In an April 2026 profile, Local News Pasadena described owner Linda Zadoian's restaurant as "formerly Fiore Market" and quoted her on the patio she has expanded. "The patio was so small, and we kind of outgrew the space," she said. "I wholeheartedly believe in creating spaces for people to spend time."
That line is close to the Disselhorsts' own founding statement, and the garden has outlasted the change of owners. Piccadilly Grace's South Pasadena page lists hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. That covers breakfast, which Fiore's lunch-only schedule never did.
Three days, three addresses
SPARC spreads the weekend across three venues within a few blocks of each other, each with its own format and price.
| Date | Time | Venue | Address | Admission |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Friday, Nov. 13 | 6–8 p.m. | SPARC Centre Gallery | 1000 Fremont Ave., Suite 120 | Free |
| Saturday, Nov. 14 | 11 a.m.–4 p.m. | Visionarium Live Italian | 1020 Mission St. | $100 |
| Monday, Nov. 16 | Doors 6:30 p.m., film 7 p.m. | South Pasadena High School Auditorium | 1401 Fremont Ave. | Free, first come |
Friday at the gallery. The opening reception is a casual public meet-and-greet with Bill and director Steve Dabal, held around the corner from the garden where Fiore started. The gallery entrance is off the rear parking lot on El Centro, not on Fremont. The same night, the SPHS Senior Art Showcase opens on the gallery walls, with work by students in South Pasadena High School's Art Portfolio Development program.
Lunch and a screening on Mission Street. Visionarium Live Italian is a Made-in-Italy concept store that also works as an art gallery, showroom and wine bar, with music and film events. It celebrated its ribbon cutting and grand opening at 1020 Mission Street on October 19, 2024, and Pasadena Now's opening coverage named Lorenzo Lisi as a co-owner. SPARC calls the Saturday screening "intimate." A rustic, family-style Italian lunch follows the film, then a Q&A with Bill and the filmmakers. Ticket sales help fund the film's distribution and pay for Monday's free screening, so the $100 seat also helps cover a free one. Tickets are on SPARC's events page.
A free encore to close the weekend. The Monday screening at the high school auditorium needs no ticket, and seating is general admission. Bill and Dabal take questions after the film.
The documentary runs 90 minutes. SPARC's synopsis describes it as a film about "how love, loss, and community shape who we are," with the Italian countryside as the backdrop and Bill looking back at the South Pasadena community he left behind.
The gallery keeps going after the premiere
The Friday reception also shows how much SPARC's room on Fremont has taken on since the move. In its 2024 announcement, SPARC said Suite 120 would host curated exhibitions, its Coffee Table Books Live series, music, poetry readings and other live events. The Chamber of Commerce gallery on Mission Street changed to showing work by local students starting in June 2025.
This fall has followed that plan. In October the gallery hung A World in Ink, an exhibition of ink and watercolor work by Gail Meltzer, Eric Fabbro, Bianca Fuchs and Vivian Tong, with an opening reception on October 10 and extra viewing hours during the South Pasadena Arts Crawl on October 17. The film weekend comes next. After that, The South Pasadenan reports that SPARC's Holiday Art Market returns in December with work by Shauneen Bell, Anna Berlly, Gillian Gough, Kim Lesak and Karen Steen, plus more artists still to be named.
The city's own December dates fall nearby. The Community Services Department holds its Holiday Lighting Event at Library Park on Saturday, December 5. Breakfast with Santa follows on Saturday, December 12, from 9 to 11 a.m. at the War Memorial Building, 435 Fair Oaks Avenue. The South Pasadenan reports that tickets are $25, children 2 and under are free, and sales opened November 1.
On Friday, if you park in the rear lot for the reception, you pass the garden corner on the way in, the same corner Bill and Anne opened as Fiore in December 2010.
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