The
term Italian
diaspora refers to the large-scale migration of
Italians away from Italy in the period roughly beginning with the
unification of Italy in 1861 and ending with the
Italian economic miracle in the 1960s. The Italian diaspora
concerned more than 25 million Italians and it is considered the biggest
mass migration of contemporary times.[1]
Characteristics
Poverty was the main reason for the diaspora. Italy was until the
1950s a partially
rural society where land management practices, especially in the
South and North-East, did not easily convince farmers to stay on the
land and work the soil.[2]
Another characteristic was related to the overpopulation of southern
Italy after the improvements of the socio-economic conditions, following
the
unification process. Indeed southern Italian families after 1861
started to have access (for the first time) to hospitals, improved
hygienic conditions and normal food supply.[3]
This created a demographic boom and forced the new generations to
emigrate en masse at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the
20th century, mostly to the Americas.
The
Fascist government, in order to colonize
Libya and
the horn of Africa moved some of the excessive Italian population to
those
Italian colonies. After World War II the process started again in
huge numbers, because of the destruction during the war of Italy and its
economy.
In 2011 in the world there are 4,115,235 Italians living outside
Italy[4]
and approximately 80 million direct descendants of Italians, who
emigrated in the last two centuries.[5]
They have greatly contributed to the
Italophilia in our contemporary world.
History
There is a history of Italians working and living outside of the
Italian peninsula since ancient times. The Italian
Maritime Republics during the
Middle Ages created colonies in many areas around the Mediterranean
sea, mainly in south-eastern Europe and the
Levant.
Italian bankers and traders expanded to all parts of Europe and the
Mediterranean, sometimes creating outposts. In late medieval times,
there was a significant permanent presence in
Flanders,
Lyon, Paris, and outposts were created throughout the Mediterranean
and the Middle East.
Since the Renaissance, the services of Italian architects and artists
were sought by many of Europe's
royal courts, as far as Russia. This migration, though generally
small in numbers, and sometimes ephemeral, pre-dates the unification of
Italian states.
Before World War I
Estimates of the number of emigrants from 1876-1900 and
1901-1915, according to their region of origin.
[6]
Between 1900 and World War I 9,000,000 Italians left, most from the
south and most going to either North or South America.[7]
However, another source claims that most Italian emigrants were from
Northern Italy.[6]
As the number of Italian emigrants abroad increased, so did their
remittances, thus encouraging further emigration even in the face of
factors that might logically be thought to decrease the need to leave
such as increased wages at home. This has been termed "persistent and
path-dependent emigration flow";[7]
that is, friends and relatives who leave first send back money for
tickets, and help relatives as they arrive. This tends to support an
emigration flow since even improving conditions in the emigrant's
country take a while to trickle down to potential emigrants to convince
them not to leave. The emigrant flow was stemmed only by dramatic events
such as the outbreak of World War I, which greatly disrupted the flow of
people trying to leave Europe, or by restrictions on immigration put in
place by receiving countries. Examples of such restrictions in the
United States were the
Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the
Immigration Act of 1924. Restrictive legislation to limit emigration
from Italy was introduced by the Fascist government of the 1920s and
30s.[8]
The
unification of Italy broke down the feudal land system that had
survived in the south since the Middle Ages, especially where land had
been the inalienable property of aristocrats, religious bodies, or the
king. The breakdown of
feudalism, however, and redistribution of land did not necessarily
lead to small farmers in the south winding up with land of their own or
land they could work and profit from. Many remained landless, and plots
grew smaller and smaller and thus more and more unproductive as land was
subdivided among heirs.[2]
The Italian diaspora did not affect all regions of the nation
equally. In the second phase of emigration (1900 to World War I) most
emigrants were from the south and north-east and most of them were from
rural areas, driven off the land by inefficient land management,
lawlessness and sickness (pellagra in the north-east and cholera in the
south). Robert Foerster, in Italian Emigration of our Times
(1919)
[9]
says, " [Emigration has been]…well nigh expulsion; it has been exodus,
in the sense of depopulation; it has been characteristically permanent."
Mezzadria, a form of sharefarming where tenant families obtained
a plot to work on from an owner and kept a reasonable share of the
profits, was more prevalent in central Italy, which is one of the
reasons why there was less emigration from that part of Italy. The south
lacked entrepreneurs, and absentee landlords were common. Although
owning land was the basic yardstick of wealth, farming in the south was
socially despised. People did not invest in agricultural equipment but
in such things as low-risk state bonds.[2]
The assumption that emigration from cities was negligible has an
important exception, and that is the city of Naples.[2]
The city went from being the capital of its own kingdom in 1860 to being
just another large city in Italy. The loss of bureaucratical jobs and
the subsequently declining financial situation led to high unemployment.
In the early 1880s epidemics of cholera also struck the city, causing
many people to leave. The epidemics were the driving force behind the
decision to rebuild entire sections of the city, an undertaking known as
the "risanamento"
(literally "making healthy again") a pursuit that lasted until the start
of World War I.
During the first few years before the unification of Italy emigration
was not particularly controlled by the state. Emigrants were often in
the hands of emigration agents, whose job it was to make money for
themselves by moving emigrants. Abuses led to the first migration law in
Italy, passed in 1888, to bring the many emigration agencies under state
control.[10]
On 31 January 1901 the Commissariat of Emigration was created,
granting licenses to carriers, enforcing fixed ticket costs, keeping
order at ports of embarkation, providing health inspection for those
leaving, setting up hostels and care facilities and arranging agreements
with receiving countries to help care for those arriving. The
Commissariat tried to take care of emigrants before they left and after
they arrived. This included dealing with the labor laws in the US that
discriminated against alien workers (the
US alien contract labor law of 1885) and even suspending, for a
while, emigration to Brazil, where many migrants had wound up as virtual
slaves on large coffee plantations.[10]
The Commissariat also helped to set up remittances sent by emigrants
from the United States back to their motherland, which turned into a
constant flow of money amounting, by some accounts, to about 5% of the
Italian national product.[11]
In 1903 the Commissariat also set the available ports of embarkation as
Palermo, Naples and Genoa, excluding the port of Venice which had
previously also been used.[12]
Between the
World Wars
Although the physical perils involved with transatlantic ship traffic
during the First World War obviously disrupted emigration from all parts
of Europe, including Italy, the condition of various national economies
in the immediate post-war period was so bad that immigration picked up
almost immediately. Foreign newspapers ran "scare" stories that,
substantially, were not much different than those published 40 years
earlier (when, for example, on Dec. 18, 1880, the New York Times ran an
editorial, "Undesirable Emigrants", that was full of typical invective
of the day against the "promiscuous immigration…[of]…the filthy,
wretched, lazy, criminal dregs of the meanest sections of Italy.")
Somewhat toned down was a New York Times article of April 17, 1921,
which reported under the headline "Italians Coming in Great Numbers"
that the "Number of Immigrants Will Be Limited Only By Capacity of
Liners" (there was now a limited number of ships available due to recent
wartime losses) and that potential emigrants were thronging the quays in
the cities of Genoa and Naples. Furthermore:
- "…The stranger walking though a city like Naples can easily
realize the problem the government has to do with. The side
streets…are literally swarming with children, who sprawl in the
paved roadway and on the sidewalks. They look dirty and
happy…Suburbs of Naples…swarm with children who, for number, can
only be compared to those in Delhi, Agra and other cities in the
East Indies…"
The extreme economic difficulties of post-war Italy and the severe
internal tensions within the nation (which led to the rise of Fascism)
"pushed" 614,000 emigrants away in 1920, half of them going to the
United States. ("Push" as opposed to the economic "pull" of a foreign
nation in need of immigrant labor—the case in earlier decades.) When the
Fascists came to power in 1922 there was a general slowdown in the flow
of emigrants from Italy—eventually. However, during the first five years
of Fascism, one and one-half million people left Italy.[13]
That is 300,000 persons per year, a number quite comparable to the early
years of the 20th century. Even as late as 1930, 300,000 emigrants left
Italy in that single year. By that time, the nature of the emigrants had
changed; there was, for example, a marked increase in the rise of
relatives of non-working age who were moving to be with their families
who had gone before.
In general, the Fascist government spun the entire emigration saga to
its own benefit. A 1927 study by the Italian government estimated that
there were some 9,200,000 living abroad—one fifth of the Italian nation
lived abroad.[13]
Thus, on the one hand, the government could claim that the slowdown in
emigration was due to the successful economic policies of the
government, and, on the other hand, could view the massive presence of
Italians abroad as a powerful potential, a kind of cultural colonialism.
1945 to date
|
This
section requires
expansion. (September 2009) |
In a wave of temporary Italian migration, from 1945 to the early
1970s (peaking in the period after World War II), Italian "guest
workers" went mostly to Austria, Belgium, France,
West Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg.[14]
Italy is still suffering from a high rate of
brain drain because of little private research, poor state
universities management and little incentives for researchers.[15]
By continent
America
Italian immigration to
Argentina and
Uruguay,
along with
Spanish, formed the backbone of the
Argentine and
Uruguayan societies. Minor groups of Italians started to immigrate
to Argentina as early as the second half of the 17th century.[16]
However, the stream of Italian immigration to Argentina became a mass
phenomenon between 1880-1920 when Italy was facing social and economic
disturbances. Argentine culture has significant connections to Italian
culture in terms of language, customs and traditions.[17]
it is estimated up to 53-60% of the population or 23 million Argentines
have full or partial italian ancestry.[18][19]
According to the
Ministry of the Interior of Italy (Ministero dell'Interno),
there are 527,570 Italian citizens living in the Argentine Republic.[20]
Italian Brazilians are the largest number of people with full or
partial Italian ancestry outside of Italy. Nowadays, it's possible to
find millions of descendants of Italians, from the southeastern state of
Minas Gerais to the southernmost state of
Rio Grande do Sul, with the majority living in
São
Paulo[21]
and the highest percentage in the southeastern state of
Espírito Santo (60-75%).[22][23]
Small southern Brazilian towns, such as
Nova Veneza, have as much as 95% of their population of Italian
descent.[24]
A substantial influx of Italian immigrants to Canada began in the
early 20th century when over a hundred thousand Italians moved to
Canada. In the post-war years (1945-1970s) another influx of Italians
emigrated to Canada, again from the south but also from
Veneto
and Friuli
and
displaced Italians from
Istria. Almost 1,000,000 Italians reside in he Province of
Ontario,
making it a strong global representation of the Italian diaspora.
Toronto holds a strong Italian community, as well as Vaughan,
Ontario
and
Hamilton, Ontario, which has over 25,000 residents with ties to its
sister city in
Sicily,
Racalmuto.
Starting in the late 19th century until the 1950s, the United States
became a main destination for Italian immigrants, most settling
originally in the
New York metropolitan area,
Boston,
Philadelphia,
Chicago,
Cleveland,
Detroit,
Buffalo, NY,
Pittsburgh,
San Francisco, and
New Orleans. Many
Italian Americans still retain aspects of their
culture.
In movies that deal with cultural issues, Italian American words and
lingo are sometimes spoken by the characters. Although many do not speak
Italian fluently, over 1 million speak Italian at home according to the
2000 US Census.[25]
Other very important italian comunity is the one of Venezuela,
developed especially after the Second World War.They are about 600
thousand people, that can reach 1 milion including people with at the
least one italian grandparent. Indeed, the Italian-Venezuelans have
obtained significant results in the contemporary society of Venezuela.
The Italian Embassy calculates that 1/4 of the Venezuelan industries,
not related to the oil sector, are directly or indirectly owned and/or
managed by Italian-Venezuelans.[6]
Important Italian communities also live in Dominican Republic,
Panama, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Chile.
Europe
In a wave of temporary Italian migration, from 1920 to the early
1970s (peaking in the periods of World War I and World War II), Italian
"guest
workers" went mostly to Austria, Belgium, France,
West Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg.[14]
Italian migration into what is today France has been going on, in
different migrating cycles from the end of the 19th century to nowadays.[26]
In addition,
Corsica
passed from the
Republic of Genoa to France in 1770, and the area around
Nice and
Savoy
from the
Kingdom of Sardinia to France in 1860. Initially, Italian
immigration to modern France (late 18th to the early 20th C.) came
predominantly from northern Italy (Piedmont,
Veneto),
then from central Italy (Marche,
Umbria),
mostly to the bordering southeastern region of
Provence.[26]
It wasn't until after World War II that large numbers of immigrants from
southern Italy immigrated to France, usually settling in
industrialised areas of France, such as
Lorraine, Paris and
Lyon.[26]
Today, it is estimated that as many as 5 million
French nationals have Italian ancestry going back three generations.[26]
In Switzerland, Italian immigrants (not to be confused with a large
autochthonous population of
Italophones in
Ticino
and
Grigioni)[27]
reached the country starting in the late 19th century, most of whom
eventually came back to Italy after the rise of
Italian Fascism. Future Fascist leader
Benito Mussolini emigrated in Switzerland in 1902, only to be
deported after becoming involved in the socialist movement.[28]
A new migratory wave began after 1945, favoured by the lax immigration
laws then in force.[29]
Africa
Italian communities once thrived in the former African colonies of
Eritrea
(50,000 Italian settlers in 1935),[30]
Somalia
and Libya
(150,000 Italians settled in Libya, constituting about 18% of the total
population).[31]
A significant portion of the
pied-noir community of French
Algeria
and Tunisia were also of Italian descent, though much of this population
naturalized as French citizens, and most migrated to France after
Algerian and tusinian independences.
Today, there are still some Italian descendants remnant in African
nations since colonial days, although most returned to Italy or moved
elsewhere after the second world war. There is a significant
post-colonial immigrant community, however, in South Africa.
Oceania
Italians arrived in Australia most prominently in the decades
immediately following the Second World War, and they and their
descendants have had a significant impact on the culture, society and
economy of Australia. The 2006 Census counted 199,124 persons who were
born in Italy, and Italian is the fifth most identified ancestry in
Australia with 852,418 responses. Italian Australians experienced a
relatively low rate of return migration to Italy.
A photographic record of the migrant experience in Australia can be
seen in a collection of images held at the
National Museum of Australia, created by Sicilian-born Carmello
Mirabelli. Mirabelli arrived in Sydney on the ship Assimina in
1951. He worked as an itinerant seasonal fruit-picker and cane-cutter
across Australia, taking photographs with a
Zeiss Ikon Nettar camera to send to his mother to show what life was
like in Australia.[32]
By region of
origin
The immigration patterns of the Italian diaspora varied, sometimes
radically, from a
region of Italy to another. As with many other immigrant groups,
Italians tended to emigrate along with or after relatives or
friends, often emigrating by the hundreds from the same village for the
same destination, which led to great divergences in the composition of
the diaspora in different countries and also within the different
regions of larger countries such as the United States.
Calabria
The
Calabrian diaspora refers to the migration of
Calabrians between the unification of Italy in 1861 and the
beginning of World War I in 1914, a second mass-migration in the
interwar period and the last period from 1945 until the 1980s.
Bedford is home to one of the largest concentrations of
Italian immigrants in the
United Kingdom. According to a 2001 census, 2 in 7 (almost 30%) of
Bedford's population are of at least partial Italian descent. This is
mainly as a result of labour recruitment in the early 1950s by the
London Brick Company in the southern Italian regions of
Puglia,
Campania,
Calabria,
Molise,
Abruzzo
and Sicily.[33]
Tuscany
The areas of
Tuscany
traditionally most affected by emigration were today's provinces of
Lucca and
Massa-Carrara.[34]
Tuscans were among the first contemporary inhabitants of the Italian
peninsula to emigrate in significant numbers: already in the second half
the 17th century, lumberjacks, coalmen and farmers began to leave the
Garfagnana for
Corsica,
while
figurinai (figurine makers) left for France, England and Spain.[34]
By the early 19th century, Tuscan figurinai could be found in every
corner of the globe, being present in
Düsseldorf,
Montreal, New York City,
Chicago,
Caracas,
Pernambuco and even New Zealand.[34]
Large-scale migrations for the new world only began in the 1880s.[34]
Most Tuscans worked abroad just for the time necessary to save enough
money to buy landholdings back in Tuscany and marry.[34]
Mass-migrations from Tuscany largely ended after the
Great Depression, with the exception of a migratory wave towards
Australia, which was however far smaller than the preceding ones.[34]
Main destinations of Tuscan migrants
Corsica |
|
Bastia, rural areas |
2,500 by 1760;
over 10,000 by the 1870s |
1650s–1870s |
Mostly seasonal agricultural workers |
ASEI |
France |
Provence |
|
|
second half of the 19th century |
young men, also young women of peasant origin, who worked as
nannies |
ASEI |
Brazil |
South,
Southeast |
São Paulo |
|
1880–1898 |
farmers in the coffee plantations in Brazil's interior, a
1898 crisis in coffee prices forced many back to Tuscany |
ASEI |
United
States |
Northern California |
San Francisco and neighbouring rural areas |
|
1860s - 1920s |
In San Francisco, agricultural commerce, transport and sale
of fruit and vegetables. |
ASEI |
|
Philadelphia and
Chicago metropolitan areas |
|
Tuscans worked in many economic sectors in every part of the
country, from
Montana to the
Panama Canal Zone |
Source: Adriano Boncompagni (2006-02-27).
"L'emigrazione toscana" (in Italian). ASEI–Archivio Storico
dell'Emigrazione Italiana. Retrieved
2010-03-29.
Umbria
Before the 20th century, the
Umbrian
migratory flux was insignificant, never reaching more than 35-40
emigrants per year.[35]
Emigrated Umbrian men predominantly worked as miners, owing to the
experience that many accumulated in the sector by working in the
Lignite
mines near
Spoleto,
and possibly from a cultural influence from the neighbouring regions of
Marche
and
Romagna, who already had a tradition of working as miners abroad.[35]
After World War I, the migratory flux resumed to the usual
destinations (with the exception of Germany) from 1919 until the onset
of the
Great Depression, without ever reaching the pre-1914 levels again.[35]
The Umbrian contribution to the
Italian settlements in Africa was also modest.[35]
Main destinations of Umbrian migrants, 1900-1914
United
States |
North-Eastern
Pennsylvania |
Jessup,
Old Forge,
Pittston,
Reading and its suburbs |
over 30,000 |
|
The most popular destination for Umbrians immigrating to the
US, who mostly worked as miners |
ASEI |
Michigan and
Minnesota |
Iron Mountain,
Hibbing,
Chisholm,
Virginia,
Eveleth |
Mostly working in iron mines |
ASEI |
France |
Côte d'Azur,
Alpes Maritimes |
|
37.000 |
2,000-3,000 |
Migrations began in the 1870s, mostly seasonal agricultural
workers from the
Upper Tiber Valley; also tourist sector (working in hotels,
cafés); women worked as nannies |
ASEI |
Meurthe-et-Moselle |
Longwy,
Villerupt |
Iron mines, steelworks |
Germany |
Bavaria,
Baden |
|
32,000 |
|
bricklayers, manual labourers, nannies |
ASEI |
Lorraine,
Rhineland,
Westphalia,
Ruhr |
|
Mostly miners (miners predominantly came from the
Gubbio–Gualdo
Tadino Apennine), also steel workers |
ASEI |
Switzerland |
|
Basel,
Arbon,
St. Gallen,
Rorschach |
27,000 |
|
Bricklayers, agricultural workers, also women aged 14–20
from
Perugia and the
Trasimeno region, who worked in the textile and
manufacturing industries |
ASEI |
Source: Luciano Tosi (2007-04-10).
"L'emigrazione all'estero dall'Umbria" (in Italian). ASEI–Archivio
Storico dell'Emigrazione Italiana.
Retrieved 2010-03-29.
Figures
Emigration,
1870-1914
After 1890, Italian contribution to the emigration flow to the
New world was significant. By 1870, Italy had about 25,000,000
inhabitants (compared to circa 40,000,000 in Germany and circa
30,000,000 in the United Kingdom).[36]
A preliminary census
[8] done in 1861 after the annexation of the South claimed
that there were a mere 100,000 Italians living abroad. Early figures
such as those are not absolutely reliable and serve only as a general
guide.[citation
needed] The General Directorate of Statistics did
not start compiling official emigration statistics until 1876.[10]
Accurate figures on the decades between 1870 and World War I show how
emigration increased dramatically during that period:
Italian emigrants per 1,000 population[37]
- 1870-1879: 4.29
- 1880-1889: 6.09
- 1890-1899: 8.65
- 1900-1913: 17.97
The high point of Italian emigration was 1913, when 872,598 persons
left Italy.[8]
Extrapolating from the circa 25,000,000 inhabitants of Italy at the
time of unification, natural birth and death rates (without considering
emigration) would have been expected to produce a population of about 65
million by 1970. Instead, because of emigration earlier in the century,
there were only 54 million.[38]