The Italian diaspora relates to the massive number of people of Italian descent who live around the world outside of Italy. While some of these people are descendants of small communities of Italians who settled overseas in the medieval and early modern periods, notably merchants from trading cities like Venice and Genoa who migrated to Turkey and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, the overwhelming bulk of the Italian diaspora is the result of the enormous emigration from Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. During this era, well over ten million Italians left their home and headed overseas, primarily to the United States, but an often overlooked aspect of the Italian diaspora was the level of migration to South America and Argentina in particular.[1]
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Chronology of events
There was a long-standing tradition of Italians emigrating overseas for centuries before the nineteenth century. Beginning as early as the 1090s, when the Christian Crusades to the Holy Land were first undertaken, Venetian, Genoese, Pisan, and Florentine merchants had begun drifting to major trading cities in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea such as Constantinople, Alexandria, Acre, Caffa, Smyrna and Salonica. As a consequence, in the late medieval and early modern periods, small communities of Italians emerged in regions like the Crimean Peninsula, the western coast of Anatolia in Turkey, and some of these Eastern Mediterranean cities.[2]
Nevertheless, all of this medieval and early modern migration was dwarfed by what would occur in the nineteenth century. Much of this was owing to the unification of Italy into a single state after centuries of the peninsula being fragmented into a dozen or so large states such as Florence, Naples, Venice, Milan, and the Papal States. Unification, or the Risorgimento as it is also known, inspired by the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, led to vast social and economic changes which fueled migrations in the decades that followed. For instance, the system of landholding in regions like Naples and Sicily was overhauled, making it much more difficult for small farmers to subsist on their allotments.[3]
At the same time, the advent of industrialization in northern Italy in particular, and the widespread introduction of vaccines against diseases like smallpox, began to drive infant mortality down and life expectancies up, causing the Italian population to grow exponentially. Where there had been an estimated 15 million inhabitants of the peninsula in 1750, this increased to roughly 19 million or so by 1800 and then ballooned to over 25 million by the time of unification in 1861.[4] The country quite simply could not maintain this many people and tens of thousands began leaving every year in the 1860s and 1870s; this soon swelled to hundreds of thousands every year in the 1890s and 1900s. The exponential increase was largely owing to the sending of money back to Italy by the first waves of migrants, which money then allowed for better living conditions back at home and attracted additional family members, cousins, and friends to migrate to the Americas and other locations.[5]
Extent of migration
The exact extent of the level of migration from Italy between 1860 and 1930 is not precisely known, notably because records were not kept of emigration prior to 1876, but historians of the Italian diaspora place the figure somewhere between ten and sixteen million, making this the largest European diaspora of the modern era. The most intense period of migration was undoubtedly between the mid-1870s and the mid-1910s, as the First World War put a brake on the migration from 1914 onwards, although it resumed in great numbers again in the 1920s, before finally tapering off as countries like the United States imposed immigration restrictions as the Great Depression took hold in the early 1930s.
Although the stereotypical view of the Italian migrants of the age is that they hailed from the poor parts of southern Italy in Sicily and around Naples, this is not accurate. In the earlier decades in the 1870s, 1880s, and even 1890s, a larger proportion of the Italians leaving their homeland were doing so from the north of the country around regions like the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, the plains of Lombardy, and Piedmont. For instance, as many as 1.7 million Italians or more emigrated from Venice and the wider Veneto hinterland between 1876 and 1900, while only roughly 225,000 people left Sicily during the same era. This shifted dramatically, though, from the turn of the century onwards, and in the fifteen years up to the outbreak of the First World War approximately 1.1 Sicilians left Italy, with over one and a half million leaving Calabria and Campania around Naples and the toe of Italy.[6]
Demographic impact
These Italian migrants left for a wide range of regions. Although it is not widely acknowledged today, a sizeable number early on in the 1860s and 1870s left for Eastern Europe, settling in places like the Black Sea coast and what is now Ukraine. However, the overwhelming majority did head for the Americas. Of these, a massive proportion went to the United States, probably in the region of five million between the 1860s and the end of the 1920s. Two million alone arrived in the US in the 1900s, with a further one million in the 1910s.[7] Despite the fact that many were coming from rural communities back home, they tended to settle in America’s cities, with New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Pittsburgh being the main centers of Italian settlement, though many moved on to other parts of the country like Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco, San Diego, and New Orleans. As a result of all of this, it is estimated that there are 18 million Italian Americans today.[8] Millions of Italians also left for South America. Some settled in Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil, but the center of Italian migration on the continent was Argentina. Over 150,000 Italians moved to the country in the 1870s. This figure more than trebled in the 1880s when 493,000 Italians migrated to Argentina, with a similar number in the 1890s and beyond. Overall, between 1870 and 1920 well over two million Italians left Europe for Argentina. By that time one in four of Argentina’s 8.8 million people were first, second, or third-generation Italian Argentines. Unsurprisingly Italian Argentines are the largest ethnic group in Argentina today, greater even than Spanish Argentines. Roughly 25 million out of Argentina’s 45 million people, or 62% of the population, have Italian ancestry of some kind. The tale of Italian migration to Argentina is one of the greatest overseas migrations in human history, with Juan Domingo Perón to Lionel Messi to Pope Francis being Italian Argentines.[9]
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References
- ↑ Italian Immigration. Digital History
- ↑ Moukarzel, Pierre. Venetian Merchants in Thirteenth-Century Alexandria and the Sultans of Egypt: an Analysis of Treaties, Privileges and Intercultural Relations. Al-Masāq | Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean. Volume 28, 2016 - Issue 2
- ↑ Dore, Grazia. Some Social and Historical Aspects of Italian Emigration to America. Journal of Social History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1968), pp. 95-122
- ↑ Population of Italy from 1770 to 2020. Statista
- ↑ Emigration Across the Atlantic: Irish, Italians and Swedes compared, 1800–1950. EGO | European History Online
- ↑ Giuseppe Piccoli, ‘Italian Immigration in the United States’ (MA, Duquesne University, 2014), pp. 8–15.
- ↑ The Great Arrival. Library of Congress
- ↑ Frank J. Cavaioli, ‘Patterns of Italian Immigration to the United States’, in The Catholic Social Science Review, Vol. 13 (2008), pp. 213–229, at p. 220.
- ↑ Samuel L. Bailly, Immigrants in the Land of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870 to 1914 (New York, 1999), p. 54.