1 - Looking at the "other Italians"

The diaspora of nearly 60-million paisans stretches acrosss every continent

Italians who live abroad officially number 3,971,652: 2,218,044 in Europe, 350,958 in North America, 1,186,668 in South America, 124,733 in Oceania, 29,916 in North Africa and the Middle East, 49,533 in southern Africa, and 11,800 in Asia.
Of course, our folk in the diaspora are much more numerous, and are estimated at 60-million. But these are the figures shown in consular registries. Therefore, this is the basis for assessing how many voters are interested to the recent law allowing the expression of their vote abroad.
The difference between official and real figures has an explanation: enrolling in consular registries never was a high priority for Italians living out of the national territory. In the past they had no incentive to do so; maybe now they will do precisely in order to vote.
However, this series of reports is not concerned with the vote. Actually, the vote is a backdrop for a long intercontinental trip having other purposes: telling the story of our communities, halfway between history and breaking news; comparing the different brands of multiculturalism in the countries with a large Italian presence; and finding out how much this presence has influenced the development of these countries. By looking for the "other Italians" we shall understand how much of Italy can be found all over the world.
The United Kingdom is our first stop, for two very good reasons: it was the first country to adopt a multicultural social structure, and it was one of the first to open the gates to our people, despite wounds still open. It happened right after World War II, in the late '40s, when British industries damaged or destroyed by wartime bombings had to be rebuilt. In the same period, other European countries received the massive migration from Italy, but it is worth remarking that Italians and British soldiers had fought ferociously, with the hate generated over 20 years, on opposing sides; after the war, many veterans worked side by side, growing together.

Men of good will

If Europe has enjoyed more than half a century of peace, this is also due to Italian workers who helped build and rebuild cities, factories, roads and bridges; who dug the ground to open the way to subway lines or to mine coal. They even had the ability to settle in the countries where they worked, helping them understand that borders were mere conventions that men of good will could overcome. Our people displayed a lot of good will: this is history, as well as memory.
About the great Italian diaspora many things (maybe too many) have been written and said, but the most noticeable aspect is that through it the Europeans, survivors of the racist delirium, discovered their common nature. With the fall of any pretext for wars and conflicts, they started to build Europe together.
Let's not think, however, that Italian emigration is typical of the modern age: for centuries it was one of the major components of economy and society, and not always propelled by poverty.
Great migrations of workers were recorded since the Middle Ages, and not only from the countryside to the towns or from poor areas to richer ones, but also within the same area, where specialized labour was in demand. After a while, with the opening of new roads and the creation of new conditions, Italians began to expatriate towards neighbouring countries.
In the late XV century, in Budapest, Hungary, a thriving colony of Neapolitan merchants, craftsmen and intellectuals existed. They had arrived following Beatrice d'Aragona, who had married King Mathias Corvinus in 1476. In the late XVI century, other merchants - mostly Venetians and Lombards - settled in France, Poland, Bohemia and southern Germany.

Italians in Canada since the XVII century

The migration to Poland was one of the earliest movements of intellectuals: the backwardness of Polish state structures and the need to revamp them offered to many secretaries and bureaucrats the opportunity for better wages and interesting career development. In the following century, artists, architects and skilled construction workers (especially from Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice and Friuli took up stable residence in Prague, Krakow, and St. Petersburg, where they created brotherhoods and construction companies.
Around the first half of the XVIII century, Italians also settled in North America. Historian Luca Codignola identified some Italians among the soldiers of the French army that defended Nouvelle France from British expansion. At the time, soldiers used to adopt a nickname. Italians followed suit, adopting French nicknames, but traces of their original names remained: Genoese Domenico Bregante, for instance, who was called Jean-Lourd, or Florentine Carlo Luciniani, nicknamed Charles de Lusignan, or Jean-Baptiste Botin surnamed Piemont (who was in fact Piedmontese), barber by trade, as his papers reported.
There was also a Roman, Jean-Baptiste Laverdure, who may have chosen his nickname because of his food preference (it means "green vegetables").
Italians, however, had been in Canada as far back as a century earlier, and not just as missionaries like the famous Father Bressani who lived among the Hurons from 1642 to 1650. In the latter half of the XVII century, two political exiles arrived in Canada, escaping from the police of the Kingdom of Naples: Sicilian Tommaso Crisafi and Neapolitan Enrico Tonti. They became Henry de Tonty and Thomas Crisafy, and Canadian encyclopaedias still report them as such.
After the Unification of Italy in 1861, and thanks to the introduction of statistical surveys, the Italian migratory movements began to be scientifically analyzed.

27 million left Italy

Four main phases of emigration can be identified: the first goes from 1876 to 1900; the second, from 1900 to World War I in 1914; the third coincides with the years between the two World Wars 1918 to 1939; and the last goes from 1945 to the late '60s.
Destinations were mostly the same: Europe, South America (especially Brazil and Argentina), and later the United States. After World War II there was a major diversification: traditional destinations are abandoned, as the USA and Argentina introduced rigorous measures to discourage the arrival of more foreign workers.
That is when Canada, Venezuela and Australia began to appeal to our emigrants.
Some data gives a rough estimate of the size of this migration: from 1876 (when the first official survey was conducted) until 1900, almost 5.5 million Italians expatriated; in the period from 1901 to 1915, the figure increases to 8.7 millions; in the 30 years between the end of WWII and 1975, 7.4 millions more left Italy.
The final tally is included in an essay by Antonio Golini and Flavia Amato: from 1876 to 1988, almost 27 million people walked the path of emigration. According to a 1994 survey done by Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, first-generation emigrants and their descendants now add up to 58.5 million, spread out all across the world.
In our trip through Europe, America and Australia we shall try and see how they left, but most of all who these "other Italians" are, many of whom will now be able to vote, and be elected, in Rome's Parliament. The "other Italy" discusses this issue, it's not indifferent to it. People expect the vote to show new cultural parameters: for Italy, who will have to take the needs, ways of thinking, and expectations of the "other Italians"; and for themselves, who will have to understand what their country of origin may give and need.
Everybody will win, because the arid pragmatism of the New and Newest World and the century-old dynamics that made Italy great, and occasionally very little, need to go hand in hand. They will maybe produce a new breed of Italians, a border-less homo novus who will resemble both Leonardo da Vinci and George Washington. And who will be a citizen, not a subject any more.

Publication Date: 2002-07-14
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=1579