PUEBLO • Every step in the neighborhood comes with a memory.

“My great-uncle lived there,” Vince Gagliano says, pointing at one house and then another. “The Volores lived there, the Valles lived there. My cousin, Rose, lived there. The Estradas lived there.”

Gagliano grew up around here, here in the shadow of the steel mill that brought his family and waves of other Italian immigrants to the booming city near the turn of the 20th century.

The people have come and gone in the neighborhood. But here, between the old houses, a family institution remains.

That’s Gagliano’s Italian Market and Deli, that square brick of a building adorned in red, white and green — colors of the flag that first proudly waved here more than 100 years ago.

Vince Gagliano’s great-uncles opened for business in 1921. Uncle Joe and Vito sold Italian sausage and other meats, cheeses and breads and filled the shelves with imported goods from their native land. They unloaded pastas, oils and jars of preserves from the train.

For the immigrant laborers and families who settled in Pueblo, Gagliano’s was meant to be a taste of home. And so it is today.

It’s easy to imagine Vince and his sister, Bonnie, hearing the same remark today as their uncles’ customers four generations ago.

“It’s the smells,” Bonnie says. “Most people when they come in, they go, ‘Mmm, this smells just like my grandma’s kitchen.’”

That’s especially when the sauce is boiling in the back. In the back is the siblings’ mom, Josephine. At 79, she’s often found here in the kitchen, cooking lasagnas and eggplant Parmesan to be frozen and taken home by the latest generation of loyal patrons.

Josephine also bakes cookies back here, behind the deli counter, where Bonnie cuts meats and cheeses by the pound or stacks them on sandwiches. The muffuletta is a favorite, complete with the family’s own olive mix.

On the weekends — when out-of-towners are known to flood the store — the meatball sub is available, with the meatballs also mixed straight from the family’s hands. Those out-of-towners don’t leave without olive oil from Josephine’s childhood farm back in Italy.

That’s Josephine’s husband up front at the register, 85-year-old Tony. He’s the love of her life who brought her to Pueblo as a teenager in 1963.

The workday space between them, one up front and the other in the back, inspires the banter common around the clock at Gagliano’s: “He’s over there, I’m over here, and we don’t fight!” Josephine says.

Meanwhile, across the street at the family’s meat-packing facility, Vince’s wife prepares sausage for the big groceries and several restaurants in town. It’s sausage mixed with the same seasoning Aunt Carmella perfected a century ago. Now in signature batches Ann-Marie adds Pueblo’s famed green chile that her husband gets from the local farms.

“She’s not a good employee,” Vince jokes. “She talks back.”

Ann-Marie counters: “I don’t have anybody to go to, no HR!”

Yes, it’s all in the family at Gagliano’s.

Vince, Bonnie and their parents took ownership in 1997, the latest family group stemming from the originating uncles.

Joe and Vito came by boat to America in 1910, heeding the call of opportunity like so many of their countrymen.

“Basically it was Rockefeller,” Vince says. “Right after the Civil War, they needed another population for reconstruction. They needed laborers for the mills and mines, so that’s how (Italians) came.”

They came to New York City, Chicago and Boston, as we popularly think. They also came to help build a state that was indeed still building. By 1922, History Colorado maintains roughly one in every five people living in the state was Italian.

Pueblo’s steel mill was no small part of that influx. Amid that hot, hard work and hot, desert climate, it might have been difficult to find reminders of home, a sweet taste of those green fields and Grandma’s kitchen. That’s where Gagliano’s came in.

The store was the achievement of brothers who lacked a formal education beyond the third grade but made up for it with practical wit and determination. They started the business in 1921, the year a historic flood wrecked the best of plans around Pueblo. Not for Joe and Vito.

“They were tough as nails,” Vince says.

Later, following Italy’s devastation from World War II, young Tony Gagliano — Vince’s and Bonnie’s dad — came to Pueblo alongside his father. They had little more than $100 between them.

When Vince calls Gagliano’s a home more than a business, he means it: His dad and grandpa first lived in a tiny room in the back of the store, following aunts, uncles and cousins who slept there.

The store helped raise family beyond its own.

Vince recalls one story: “One guy in his 80s came in here once and said, ‘You know, I stole a piece of candy when I was a little kid. Your uncle grabbed me and walked me home six blocks back to my parents, and I never stole again.’”

Other stories go back to the Great Depression.

“There are still people who come up to me and say, ‘Your uncle was the reason my family didn’t starve during the Depression,” Bonnie says.

He was known to waive grocery bills until people could pay. When they could pay, he gifted them a bag of fruit.

“People don’t forget that,” Vince says.

It’s that kind of guiding ethic that might be credited to Gagliano’s standing the test of time. That, and family pride. “Definitely,” Vince says. “You should honor the people that came before you and made it easy.”

It hasn’t always been easy.

Days often start early and end late. Around Christmas, when orders pile up, the family is known to sleep in the back just like family before them, the grandkids running around Grandma Josephine as she cooks late into the night.

It especially wasn’t easy when Vince and Bonnie had to close the place recently for a remodel. It was mostly painting that had to be done; the walls needed tending to after several decades, and the wooden deli case from the 1930s needed replacing.

“People were so upset,” Bonnie says.

For the closure, yes, but more so for fear of Gagliano’s changing.

They came back to find it all the same.

The walls white and strung with red, white and green lights. The checkered floor.

The shelves packed. The deli busy and full of friendly banter.

The old man in the front and his dear wife in the back, immigrants in their late life who refuse to stop working, for they say this is a dream they never dreamed — from their poor beginnings in America to their own business today surrounded by family. “I want this going forever,” Josephine says.

And there’s that smell — just like home.

On the menu

Sandwiches at Gagliano’s Deli are $13 and include chips and a drink. Customers pick from nine choices (at last check) along with toppings that include lettuce, tomato, onions and local green chile and the family owners’ own olive spread.

That spread defines the muffuletta, one of the most popular sandwiches with salami, ham, capicola and provolone, freshly cut here like the rest of the meats and cheeses.

Other customers go with the Italian #1 (capicola and salami with provolone) or Italian #2 (salami and mortadella with provolone). Combinations of roast beef, ham and turkey also available.

A couple of specialties are sold Fridays and Saturdays only: the sausage grinder and meatball sub. The meat comes straight from Gagliano’s meat-packing facility down the street.