We’re always down to cozy up at The Charles or The Senator during the winter months. But when temperatures heat up, there’s nothing like catching a flick under the stars. From public parks to picturesque wineries, tons of community spots are transforming their outdoor venues into makeshift movie theatres for the summer. So pack a picnic, spread out a blanket, and head to any one of these open-air screenings to enjoy an entertaining evening after dark.

Luigi’s Summer Movie Series
6/16-9/15: Though this deli on the Avenue in Hampden recently changed hands, new owner Allison Perrelli is maintaining the tradition of projecting films on its outdoor patio throughout the summer. Every third Friday through September, hit up The Wine Source for BYOB needs, order a cold cut, and snag a seat to unwind from the week with a lighthearted film. Luigi’s is featuring a summer vacation theme this year, screening classics like Dirty Dancing, The Great Outdoors, Heavyweights, and What About Bob? 846 W. 36th St., 8:30 p.m., Free, 443-438-4195

Summer Movie Night Series at Metro Centre in Owings Mills
6/16-8/18: From live music to food truck festivals, the public plaza at Metro Centre in Owings Mills hosts plenty of entertainment on weekends. This season, the mixed-use development is screening family-friendly flicks on the third Friday of every month. Grab dinner at one of neighboring eateries (including Eggspectation and UFood Grill) before claiming a spot to laugh aloud to comedies like The Sandlot and The Boss Baby. Grand Central Avenue, Owings Mills, Free, 8:30 p.m., 410-581-2520

Summer Movies at The Wine Bin

6/17-9/30: The Ellicott City community has made a summer tradition of posting up in The Wine Bin’s parking lot for this Saturday-night get-together. Uncork a bottle of vino, snack on requisite handfuls of popcorn, and experience an array of films spanning many different genres and decades. This year’s lineup includes something for everyone, with classics like Cool Hand Luke, rom-coms like Notting Hill, and modern thrillers including Fantastic Beasts and The Martian. 8390 Main St., Ellicott City, Free, 410-465-7804

Summer Movie Nights in Downtown Bel Air
6/23-8/25: On select Friday nights throughout the summer, squeeze in some family fun time on the lush lawn of Shamrock Park in Bel Air. Enjoy pre-show entertainment (think face-painting and magic shows) with your little ones before the movies begin at sundown. Fun films on-deck this year include Minions, The Lego Batman Movie, and Finding Dory. Lee Way and North Hickory Ave., Bel Air, Free, 443-823-1797

Pics in the Park
6/24-9/30: Downtown Partnership is bringing back this Saturday series, which features a giant pop-up screen set against the backdrop of glowing city skyscrapers. Grab a group of friends and kick back on the lawn of Center Plaza to watch the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot on June 24, a Christmas in July-themed screening of Elf on July 29, box office hit La La Land on August 26, and Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice on September 30. 222 N. Charles St., Free, 410-244-1030

Merriweather Movie Nights
6/28-8/30: Not only does Merriweather Post Pavilion have a jam-packed live music lineup planned for its 50th anniversary this summer, but the amphitheater will also be celebrating with monthly movie nights. Snuggle up on a blanket, crack open a Manor Hill beer, and take in the woodsy ambient sounds while tuning into The Last Waltz on June 28, Moana on July 26, and School of Rock on August 30. 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia, Free-$10, 410-715-5550

Free Movies at Mount Vernon Place
6/28-8/30: Gather around the Washington Monument for a midweek movie under the stars on select Wednesday nights throughout August. This season’s film fest, which will take place on the conservancy’s West Square, will feature titles including movie-musical Chicago, Frank Capra’s classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 2016 Oscar contender Arrival, and Dreamgirls featuring the powerful pipes of Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson. 699 Washington Pl., Free, 410-962-5070

Flicks From the Hill         
7/6-8/24: Dubbed one of the “World’s Best Free Things to Do” by Travel + Leisure magazine, this Thursday-evening event hosted by the American Visionary Art Museum is certainly something to cross off of your Charm City bucket list. This year, the museum’s selection of films—projected onto the side of the building on a 30-foot widescreen visible from Federal Hill—includes Napoleon Dynamite, Julie & Julia, The Nutty Professor, and Big. American Visionary Art Museum, 800 Key Highway, Free, 410-244-1900

Little Italy Open Air Film Fest
7/7-8/25: Nearly 20 years ago, late neighborhood icon “Mr. John” Pente graciously allowed the Little Italy community to set up a projector on the third floor of his home across the street from Ciao Bella Restaurant. The tradition has stuck ever since, and this annual series has become one of the tight-knit neighborhood’s most popular events. Fridays in July and August, fill up on pasta at one of the surrounding restaurants before heading over to the Da Mimmo parking lot to enjoy timeless titles including Grease, The Godfather, Rocky, and the fan-favorite Cinema Paradiso. 217 S. High St., Free, 410-727-6876

TGIF Movie Night
7/7-8/25: Family-run Basignani Winery is bringing this Friday-night film fest back to its vineyard in Sparks this summer, with flicks like Larry Crowne and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen scheduled to play on its inflatable pop-up screen. The price of admission includes a pre-show wine tasting, and the staff sells made-to-order wood-fired pizzas if you forget to pack a picnic. Basignani Winery, 15722 Falls Rd., Sparks, $12, 410-472-0703

Summer Moonlight Movie Series
7/14-8/25: Check out all of the updates from The Shops at Kenilworth’s multi-million-dollar renovation while attending this Friday-night series in July and August. Bring the whole family for this year’s films including Sing, Secret Life of Pets, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The Shops at Kenilworth, 800 Kenilworth Drive, Towson, Free

Family Movie Nights at Power Plant Live
6/13-8/15: This downtown nightlife district is rolling out family-inclusive programs this summer, including monthly movie nights. Pack up your lawn chairs and settle in to watch a collection of this year’s kid-friendly favorites including The Lego Movie, Moana, and Sing. A number of the area’s restaurants including  Tin Roof, Leinenkugel’s Beer Garden, and MEX will be offering food specials, as well as drink deals for moms and dads. 34 Market Place, Free, 410-727-5483

Cinema Al Fresco

High and Stiles Streets
September 5, 2014

As the sunlight fades behind Ciao Bella, a gathering crowd, many carrying picnic baskets and wine, or pizza from nearby Isabella’s, settles into the canvas chairs in the empty parking lot next door. A decade-and-a-half ago, Little Italy’s restaurant owners were at their wits’ end over the huge, bare billboard outside Ciao Bella’s—a planned mural had turned into a zoning dispute—until Da Mimmo’s Mary Ann Cricchio had an epiphany after catching a movie, al fresco, in the old country. By a small miracle, she says, the third-floor bedroom window of Ray Lancelotta’s row home (then owned by his uncle, John Pente) turned out to be the perfect height and distance to throw a 35mm film onto the billboard, giving birth, of course, to the annual, tourist-friendly, Little Italy Open Air Film Fest.

Per tradition, the final evening’s film is Cinema Paradiso—the story of a Sicilian filmmaker and his beloved boyhood theater’s projectionist. After Cricchio introduces the film—not last year’s shortened version, which drew protests, but the original, three-hour cut—Rick Huether, upstairs in Lancelotta’s bedroom, discreetly loads a Blu-ray disc into a digital projector. The state-of-the-art equipment replaced the cast-iron, 35mm projector several years ago, Huether, who works for Astro Events, admits out of earshot of moviegoers. “We could put the projector anywhere now, but people like to point out the white bulb in the window to friends who’ve never been to the festival,” he says, gesturing to just such a couple.

Meanwhile, Lancelotta, who’s been watching Cricchio’s introduction from a sidewalk bench, ducks inside his living room. “I’ve seen all the movies,” he says with a guilty smile. “I’m watching the Orioles tonight. They’re having a great year.”

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For Love of Country

North Point Road
September 6, 2014

The musket and cannon fire is so loud on the banks of the North Point Peninsula that some of those watching the action, including former steelworker David Crews, wear earplugs. Behind each shot, a putrid cloud of white smoke also blows forth—not out to the nearby Chesapeake Bay, naturally, but over the hillside crowd. “Oh man,” says Crews, shaking his head, interrupted by the stench as he tries to photograph Dundalk’s Defenders’ Day reenactment of the Battle of North Point. “That sulfur smell takes me right back to the “L” furnace at Sparrows Point.”

In 1814, some 4,000 hardened British redcoats landed here, planning to march to Baltimore and join the ships attacking the city. Instead, suffering key losses and slowed down by Maryland militiamen, they retreated after making it only as far as Patterson Park, where massive numbers of militia troops from the region were dug in. This afternoon, though, the British are giving as good as they get—standing firm in firing lines, lobbing volley after volley—before finally turning back. Their sergeant’s commands, however, are shouted in a noticeably un-English accent, with “About face!” for example, sounding more like “A-boot face!”

“We’re Canadian, from Niagara Falls,” Mike McAndrews explains. A bearded bear of a man, sweating profusely in his 23-ounce melton wool redcoat, heavy gray slacks, and boots, McAndrews notes that in the U.S., it’s difficult to find War of 1812 reenactors willing to portray the British. But in Canada, it’s the other way around. “To us, the loyalists were on the right side of history,” McAndrews says. “Look at whose picture is on our money—it’s the Queen.”

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Roland Avenue

September 15, 2014
Hello in There

Dale Johnson leans his 20-year-old, pale-green Bianchi bicycle against a Hampden porch, grabs three small trays—a hot lunch, a cold-cut dinner, plus fruit, juice, and milk—from the cooler atop his rack, and rings the bell. “How are you, Bruce?”

“I’m doing good,” the middle-aged man answering the door says, managing a smile while shakily grasping the food that Johnson has brought by. “Polish sausage and sauerkraut? I love Polish sausage.” After briefly reminiscing about his college lacrosse days, Bruce mentions he’s got a psychiatry appointment later and plans to take the bus. Johnson listens and nods before waving goodbye, off to his next Meals-on-Wheels delivery, part of a small, two-wheel program with other cyclists that he began two years ago. “The best thing, really, is that it attracts younger volunteers,” Johnson says. “The average age of Meals on Wheels drivers must be 77. I’m only 62,” he laughs.

Later, he hands a blind gentleman two meals and lets him know he may have found someone to help read him his mail on a regular basis.

At two homes, only a relative of the incapacitated recipient makes it to the door. At others, Johnson may be the only person some see and interact with all day. “I’ve had a few clients who’ve died, which is sad, but you also meet interesting people,” he says afterwards, still in his bike jersey and spandex shorts.

His favorite is Ms. LaRue. “She’s 98, 5-feet tall, but she still has a spark about her,” Johnson says. “She used to go ballroom dancing with her husband and my wife has me doing that, so we compare notes occasionally. ‘Tell your wife,’ she said to me once, ‘that Ms. LaRue thinks you have great legs.’”

eventy-five years ago, John Pente’s Model T Ford was the talk of Little Italy. He bought it used for $12, and had it, as the kidsmight say these days, completely tricked out.

The 25-year-old painted the car’s wheel spokes red and the fenders around the tires bright blue. He installed a homemade radio under the rumble seat that tuned in the city’s one station.

“It was my pride and joy,” he says with a smile at his kitchen table at 222 South High Street, the same house he’s lived in his entire adult life. “I polished that up every day.”

As he speaks, April sunlight filters through his windows and lands on his home’s sturdy plaster walls—walls he built himself back when he had that car.

“I know where every nail is in this house,” he tells me with a laugh. Although Pente is 100 years old, I don’t doubt him. Friends and family say he’s sharp as a tack. Less than two minutes with him proves this.

He points to an old photo that his son, Joe, has just retrieved from the basement. A young John leans up against the car, weight shifted on one leg, one arm slung proudly along the driver’s side door. His tie blows in the wind, his hair is dark brown, his pants are immaculately creased. He looks like a million bucks.

“I made a rumble seat back there,” he continues, almost not able to talk fast enough. “And I used to take my girlfriends for rides. Nobody else had a radio. I would put the top down and look at the stars and it was beautiful.”

Those were his “drugstore cowboy” days, as he calls them, when he wore custom-made suits and hats from local tailor shops with two-toned Cuban heels, and hung with his crew at a Jewish-owned Little Italy drugstore on the corner of Pratt and High Streets.

There aren’t many old-timers left in the neighborhood who remember that car, but people still certainly know John Pente.

“He’s too much!” says Pente’s longtime friend Dominic Leonardi, affectionately known around Little Italy as “Fuzzy.”

Leonardi, 84, recounts Pente’s custom of buying too much fruit for his kitchen table fruit bowl and then generously putting a few in a paper bag and handing them to off to his friend.

“He’s always givin’ me something,” he says, a smile in his voice. “If he gets a cake, he puts a slice in aluminum foil and has me take it. I’ll tell you what, that man is too much.”

It’s obvious, however, Leonardi’s not just talking about oranges, bananas, and cake. He’s talking about his oldest friend in the entire world: A man at the very center of a small universe and a large family. A man that is always glad to see you, and will always, without a doubt, make room for you on his bench.

He’s known as “Mr. John” around the neighborhood and, chances are, if you’ve visited Little Italy even just a handful of times, you’ve seen his house. If you’ve brought a chair to the neighborhood’s annual outdoor summer movie festival, you might have sat a few rows in front of him—and unknowingly reaped the rewards of both his graciousness and centrally located home, since the festival beams its projector out of his third-floor window.

His sturdy three-story home—honored as a “centennial home” last summer by Baltimore Heritage for being in his family for over 100 years—sits at the corner of South High and Stiles Streets, directly across from Isabella’s Pizza and catty-corner from Caesar’s Den restaurant. A line of well-worn wooden benches and white plastic patio chairs sits by its side entrance on Stiles Street.

“There is nothing bad about Mr. John. Absolutely nothing,” says Tina DeFranco, co-owner of Caesar’s Den. “He is the most kind-hearted man. He has opened up his home to us for so many years. His door is always open to anyone.”

If the weather’s nice, Pente’s “gang” (a familial group of Italian-American old-timers with a name roster straight out of The Sopranos) will inevitably be hanging out on those benches and chairs. Sometimes Pente will be there with them, his devoted little white dog Gina—named after old-time Italian movie star Gina Lollobrigida (“She was beautiful,” Pente sighs)—by his side. Other times he’ll be inside fixing dinner or visiting with local family members—usually his daughter Marge Schwartz-Pente or oldest son Joe—that are in and out of his house, their childhood home, every day of the week.

Pente has spent his entire life in a one-block radius. In a world where many of us are transient, often crisscrossing the country to follow work or loved ones with our childhood homes a distant memory, this is awe-inspiring.

He was born half a block away on Stiles Street, and grew up next door at 220 South High Street. After he married in 1936, he and his late wife Margaret moved to an apartment on Fawn Street (now an annex to Sabatino’s Restaurant). Purchased by his grandparents around 1904, the house at 222 South High Street was owned by his father, who passed it on to his son after Pente’s uncle died in 1941.

At the time, it wasn’t much of a home. It was an instrument repair shop and a bachelor pad. But with the help of a few friends, Pente renovated the property and rebuilt it from the inside out.

Pente has gone to the same Catholic church, St. Leo’s on South Exeter Street, his entire life. (“I’m still the oldest alter boy in St. Leo’s,” he jokes. “I got a medal to prove it.”) He played on piles of wood at the Inner Harbor when it was just a smelly lumberyard. He lived in Little Italy before it was Little Italy, when immigrant Jews and Italians lived side-by-side, cooking for one another, congregating on sidewalks on summer nights amidst the melodies of neighborhood musicians, their children sleeping on stoops when it got too hot inside.

People were happier back then, he says. Foods were simple, and clothes were plain. They had less, but their lives were full.

Happiness is “not how much money you make. It’s not true,” Pente states with great certainty. “We were happier in the old days because we never had money. If you had a few dollars in your pocket, you were rich. We had communication.”

Pente is the picture of good health. He’s a tad smaller than he once was, and his hearing is a little strained, but overall he’s had remarkably few health problems in his 100 years. In fact, he’s never had a single surgical procedure. He’s barely had more than a cold. So, what does he eat?

He stops to think, taking great care in answering. He doesn’t hurry answering most questions. After all, what’s the rush?

“I’m a lasagna eater,” he says.

He’s about to continue when he stops mid-sentence, turns to face his daughter across the kitchen table and asks how he looks. While Pente’s been in the news before because of Little Italy’s summer film festival, it’s not everyday a reporter is in his house.

“Is my hair messed up?”

“You look fine,” Marge answers warmly.

“Okay,” he says, laughing.

He used to cook nearly every day until his one significant health problem—a bout of sciatica earlier this year—slowed him down.

“When I cook, I love the old Italian style. I like lasagna, ravioli, Italian meats. Things like that,” he says.

Pente started cooking at age 14 when he worked at a small grocery store, about a block away from his childhood home next door. When he wasn’t translating, reading, writing, and keeping the books for the Italian-speaking owners, he was helping them prepare hot meals for immigrant workers, all manual laborers, during the workweek. It was this early experience cooking for crowds that made cooking for his large family such a cinch. He’s cooked for—and packed into his row home’s modest dining room—up to 18.

The Pente family is fairly large. His new white refrigerator can barely fit all of his family photos. There’s Pente and his three children—White Marsh resident Joe, John Jr. who lives in Virginia, and Marge from Rosedale—six grandchildren, and a whopping 14 great grandchildren.

“I’ve got the most loveable family,” he says, his eyes shining. “I brag about my family all the time. I can always depend on my family when I need them.”

Indeed, he attributes his longevity to his family. As for “secrets” to longevity, he says he really doesn’t have any, except one, so ingrained within him that he doesn’t even think of it as a secret anymore.

“There’s one thing you’ve always said that kept you young all these years,” Marge reminds him from across the kitchen table.

“Stay active,” he says, nodding. He recalls a story from when he was retiring from Western Electric, where he worked for 30 years. “They called to send off about a dozen people, all retiring. And the head director, he says, ‘I wanna tell you one thing. You’re all going out in the world. You’re all going to retire. Don’t stay home and sit in front of that television.’ I never do that. She knows I never do that,” he finishes, motioning to Marge who nods in agreement.

“I never get bored. I’m very active in this house,” he continues.

“He always likes to find something to do,” Marge says.

“I used to climb two steps at a time. Now I only climb one . . . Just wait ’til you’re 100 years old. You’ll understand.”

“I do not sit around. I like to maintain this house like I built it. I love flowers,” he gestures to his side entrance, full of brightly colored potted geraniums. “I love to stay out there and talk to people. I stay out there in the nighttime and the weekend. We have people from all over the world come down here to eat. I like to talk to them. And if the bench is broke, I’ll fix it so they can sit down.”

Besides his family and neighborhood, working has always been Pente’s pride and joy. Soon after Pente started work at the local grocery store, his father, who immigrated from the Calabria region of Italy when he was a young boy, bought a tall chair and a shoeshine box. He put them in a nearby barbershop, handed over shoe polish and two brushes to his teenage son, and told him to get to work.

“He said, ‘Make a living.’ And I went to work, and from there on, I never have stopped working,” he says.

The country was in the midst of the Great Depression when Pente graduated from Calvert Hall College High School in 1930. He put his new diploma under his arm and went job searching, eventually securing work in a factory putting handles on shopping bags. After six months, he became a foreman.

Knowing he’d need to leave to go into the defense industry to support the country’s World War II efforts, Pente went to night school for radio, and left the factory in 1941 to work at Western Electric’s Dundalk office, first making radar equipment for the war and eventually moving to its telephone switchboard division. He became a foreman there, too, barely taking a sick day—working extra unpaid hours in his basement workshop troubleshooting tiny telephone parts in order to get bonuses the next day.

He stayed at the company until his wife suffered a stroke. He took an early retirement to care for her until she died in 1975. She was only 59. More than 35 years later, he still wears his wedding ring. And he’s kept his promise to his family that things would never change.

“When my mother died, he said, ‘Everything is gonna be the same,’” Joe says. “And everybody gathers here and have for many, many years for dinners. This is the center of the universe. Small as it may be, there’s no feeling like sitting on the front steps and watching the world go by.”

The city has changed since John Pente was a young man. Towering buildings have sprung up all around Little Italy where there once was nothing. Many of the original Italian families have come and gone. The many neighborhood Jewish-owned stores that Pente used to depend on for day-to-day basics closed decades ago. But he’s never once thought of leaving.

“I have everything I need right here,” he says.

In the meantime, he’s learning to accept the limitations of old age.

“It’s not like it used to be, I admit it,” he says. “I used to climb two steps at a time. Now I only climb one at a time. Things like that.”

Right now, he’s having a heck of a time opening individually wrapped cookies—Biscoff, the kind that AirTran hands out on flights, delicious, those graham-flavored biscuits from Belgium. He received a special box of them from out-of-town relatives just in time for his 100th birthday party in April.

“My hands,” he pauses, rubbing his index and middle fingers against his thumb, “are like . . . waxy. Old age. Just wait ’til you’re 100 years old. You’ll understand.”

We laugh. One thing this man has never lost is his sense of humor.

His next birthday party is going to be his 105th, he says. And he’s expecting a Mercedes. Something he’s been requesting—always with a wink—from his children for at least a few years. Bear in mind that he hasn’t driven since his late-90s. But these are details to be saved for a later date.

His plans for the rest of the day are casual. Sit with his son. Marge may stop by again. Maybe he and Gina will go outside and hang with the guys for a little while. He might nap if the urge hits him.

One thing’s for sure, though. He will be here. And if you stop by even just a few times, he will quickly make you feel like part of the family.

“We’re always glad to see you,” he says, as we part ways. “Come back anytime. And if you want to make a reservation on the bench,” he adds with a smile, “lemme know.