up jobs at local industries. Indeed, much of Mooca's development was an outcome of the strong Italian immigrant influence. In 1910, two out of three inhabitants of Mooca were Italian. The largest and most important collection on the history of immigration in Brazil, and specially the large flow of Italian and immigrants arriving in São Paulo state via the port of Santos, can be found at Museu da Imigração, a state-run museum that offers a very interesting database on immigrant records.Amácio Mazzaropi museum, named after a famous Brazilian comedian born to an Italian father, is a site of interest that preserves some of Mooca's immigration golden age memories. Another site of interest that is strongly related to Mooca's Italian origins is the local soccer team stadium, Juventus Stadium (cap. 2.000). A great number of the working-class families from Mooca found prosperity and as São Paulo was gradually changing from an industrial city into a business centre, many of those families started their own businesses (such as the Lorenzetti and Matarazzo families). Many of the more affluent families now reside in Tatuapé. The local Italian community holds traditional religious celebrations and festivities all year round, being the most famous that of San Vito, Our Lady of Casaluce, San Gennaro (patron saint of Naples) and Our Lady Achiropita in the district of Bela Vista. These celebrations take place on the streets, where, aside from the true markets offering typical dishes, handicrafts and wine, stages for dance presentations and live traditional music are set up. Cultural influences A large number of Mooca's inhabitants have an Italian background although over the last century, Mooca embraced other communities from other parts of the world and regions in Brazil. Some representative communities that have contributed to Mooca's ethnic diversity are the Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Croatian, Lithuanian, Syrian, Lebanese and more recently the Bolivian and Peruvian, besides Brazilians migrants from the Northeast. Urban development Mooca's atmosphere has always been that of an industrial suburb. Buildings, homes and warehouses façades preserve traces of the Italian legacy and it is not unusual to find old preserved vilas operárias, narrow cobbled residential streets in large abandoned industries surroundings, where the Italians and other workers from different countries first settled. However, this scenery has changed as in the last decades industries have been moving out of São Paulo for it has become increasingly expensive. As a result of this phenomenon, many