Individuals from an Italian background can also be found in Bideford in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They became prominent in local ice cream manufacture as well as music.
Italians living in Bideford in the twentieth century included the Dimeo family: a strong presence as ice cream vendors in the early twentieth century, and recorded as living in Rope Street. The Pelosis were a further ice-cream family. Pelosi is recorded in the 1901 census as an ice cream maker, and the employer of ‘Cairo’, another worker.
Several Italians were travelling musicians. One family of Italian origin, Bernini, ran a tobacconist in Mill Street in the 1880s: the tobacconist is recorded in both the 1871 and 1881 census.