The 5 Best Things to Do in Little Italy, San Diego, Ranked

The former fire station still holds the equipment that used to live in it. A horse-drawn steamer, the first engine La Jolla ever had, apparatus going back to the late 1800s, and a piece of the World Trade Center — and the volunteers looking after all of it will happily talk you through whatever you point at. Children do very well here. The whole thing takes about an hour, which is the right size for an indoor stop in a neighborhood you came to walk around.

Little Italy reads differently once you know what its public spaces are saying. Stand under the Landmark Sign on India Street, then walk to Piazza Basilone, a memorial to GySgt John Basilone and the neighborhood's servicemen. Carry on to Piazza della Famiglia, 10,000 square feet of open ground between India and Columbia, then Piazza Giannini, and finish among the public art at Amici Park. It runs about a mile, and by the end the fishing families who built these blocks have stopped being an abstraction and turned into names you can point at.

There is a genuine gallery walk here, and it is small enough to do properly in one afternoon. It runs from India Street across to Kettner Boulevard: Stefanie Bales first, then Adelman, then Mee Shim, and finally the cluster of rooms at 2400 Kettner. These are independent spaces with independent taste, which is exactly the point — nobody is showing you the same four artists twice, and nobody is moving you along.

One block here does five jobs: two bocce courts, a fenced dog run, a stepped amphitheater, a patch of lawn, and Nina Karavasiles' public-art tables set through the middle of it. The tables are the reason to slow down — public art you are meant to sit at rather than stand in front of. Nothing on site supplies a bocce set, so the game arrives with you. The park shares a campus with the school next door, which means posted gates and the day's schedule decide what is open. Walk in anyway for the art.