Ari Shapiro, owner of Xoom Juice and the hip downtown coffee joint Sparkroot, is opening a new restaurant in Broadway Village that will serve high-quality coffee, pizza, hand-crafted beer, wine and other things. The new place will be named Falora Pizza & Espresso. A press release describes it as such:

TUCSON, AZ- Local entrepreneur, Ari Shapiro, has signed a lease at Broadway Village for a new Neapolitan style pizza restaurant which will also specialize in espresso & coffee as well as wine and imported and hand crafted beer. Falora Pizza & Espresso will be located at 3000 E. Broadway Boulevard at the front corner of Broadway Boulevard and Eastbourne Avenue. The restaurant will be built with an old world charm of a street side cafe, which fits the characteristics of the historic Broadway Village.

The wood burning oven is being imported from Naples, Italy and the espresso machine is being imported from Florence, Italy. Falora will serve breakfast specializing in fresh baked bread, and lunch specializing in fresh salads and it artisan pizza pies, serving them on into the evenings.

In other pizza-related news, the owners of the new downtown pizza joint Reilly Craft Pizza and Drink have started hiring, signaling that the opening can't be far off. This place, which is going in at the old Reilly Funeral Home at 102 E. Pennington St., has been under construction for almost a year, and is said to be quite striking, design-wise.

And finally, Vito's Pizza Kitchen, which closed a while back at 2921 E. Fort Lowell Road, has merged with Shlomo and Vito's New York Delicatessen at 2870 E. Skyline Drive. A press release says the restaurant will hold a reopening in August; the pizza place's website says the changes are already in place.