The Roma Club- A History of Community, Culture, and Commitment

For more than four decades, the Roma Country Club stood as a gathering place for Birmingham’s Italian-American community—a place built not by accident, but by intention.
What began in 1949 as the Bachelor’s Club—an organized fellowship of young men meeting in borrowed halls—evolved into a formally incorporated institution, rooted in family life, civic presence, and cultural continuity. By 1960, after nearly a decade of planning and fundraising, the Roma Country Club opened its doors as a permanent home for celebrations, traditions, and generations yet to come.
Drawing on newspaper archives, incorporation records, photographs, invitations, and oral histories preserved by members and their descendants, this book reconstructs the full arc of the Roma story—from informal beginnings to architectural permanence, from Golden Years to orderly dissolution.
Roma was more than a building on Venetian Way.
It was a deliberate act of community building.
This is the documented history of how that community was made—and why it mattered.