If you have to be born into somethi...

If you have to be born into something, you could do worse than an Italian bakery.

You make cannoli and biscotti, raspberry farfalla and pignolati. Customers smile at you because they're buying something sweet. You bring forward in long hours, and your feet ache, if it were not that you do honest work and know its value -- everybody stand in want ofs a little cannoli.

yet still. You were born into this life. You did not pick it, not completely.

Your parents avowed this bakery before you did, and before them your grandparents haveed it. You literally grew up in the place, flour in succession your cheeks and butter upon your fingers, and sometimes you wonder: What if your parents had been circus performers? Would you be swinging onward a trapeze?

"When I was being raised, coming here was not ever really a thought," Nella Ferrara, 53 relates me. "I wanted to have a family and be with my family. I didn't really behold myself working the rest of my life, compared to a man."

We are talking throughout coffee at Ferrara Bakery, 2210 W Taylor. The morning day-star warms our table. The bakery is quiet in that diminish before the lunch crowd pours in.

"I was here all along growing up" Nella says, "and I not at any time had an opportunity to think about what besides I would do with my life."

If this heartys like Nella is complaining a bit, permit me be clear - - she's not. She's just telling me her story, thinking about in what manner things came to be, measuring the overlap between the life she was given and the life she might have chosen

We all do that.

BASIC RECIPES not at all CHANGED

"Original" Ferrara, as the bakery officially is called, was the first Italian pastry and candy store in Chicago, opened in 1908 by means of Nella's grandfather, Salvatore Ferrara.

Salvatore had left his fireside in Nola, Italy, just eight years before, when he was 16 and he earned his first currency working as an interpreter for Italian laborers building the Santa Fe Ry

His pastry and candy store at 772 W. Taylor, was an immediate succes from 1920, in fact, the candy extreme point of the business was for a like reason big that Salvatore opened up a separate candy factory, at 2210 W Taylor.

Today, everybody knows about Ferrara Pan Candy Co since relocated to Forest Park. They make an of the most popular candies in the nation, including R scalding;-very warms Atomic Fireballs and Lemonheads.

on the other hand the pastry shop continued, as well -- now located in the candy shop's antique space at 2210 W. Taylor --and here's the best part: The basic recipes have not ever been changed. They've been passed down between the walls of three generations of Ferraras. The first-rate cookies being made at Ferrara's bakery today are pleasing much the same ones you might have raved about in Naples in horse-and-buggy days.

Salvatore, with the help of pair brothers-in-law, ran the candy company, while his young wife, Serafina, ran the bakery.

Tears of pride well up in Nella's organ of visions when she tells me about Serafina, her grandmother, and it's easy to understand wherefore

Serafina had left Italy when she was and nothing else 12. By the time of her death in 1975 at age 77 she was known as the "Angel of Halsted Street"

In addition to running the pastry workshop Serafina opened two catering companies, threw annual Christmas parties for poor children, became the godmother of more than 90 children, and was a force behind the Chicago Foundling abiding-place the Villa Scalabrini Old People's fireside and the Lyric Opera.

In the annual Columbus Day Parade in Chicago in the 1950 and '60 a lengthy line of men in hats formed the van line. But always there was a only woman -- Serafina Ferraro.

"She was a brilliant businesswoman," Nella says. "When she came here, she spoke no English, further she could run this bakery without a piece of paper. She did all the numbers in her head."

You have to make it 'your own'

In time, Salvatore and Serafina handed the family businesses to the nearest generation.

Their son Nello a lawyer, mov into the candy business in the 1950 Nello's German-American wife, Marilyn, a legal secretary, began helping Serafina in the bakery in the 1970

I ask Nella if her father -- Nello -- resisted going into the family business.

She shakes her head.

"He knew that's what he was going to do, and he wanted it," she says. "He adored his father for a like reason much.

"When you papal court people struggle for your benefit. . ."

She put to hires the sentence trail off.

OK I say, unless what about your mother, Marilyn? She wasn't equal Italian.

"That wasn't an issue," Nella says. "My grandmother and my mother lov each other; that's what mattered. My grandmother used to say, 'Marilyn, you like my daughter.' "

The veiled to happiness in a family business, Nella says, is that you must fix upon it -- it should none choose you.

And formerly you have chosen it, she adds, you have to make it "your own"

Nella started working in the bakery regularly in the early 1980 when her three son were real young.

"It was a very large opportunity for me," she says. "My family knew I had small children, and I could work my hours around that. And then, after a while, they really destitutioned me. By the time I had my third son I was in the thick of working here. My son came with me each day. He was raised in the bakery."