The great emigration
Over a century about 26 million Italians leave for the Americas, northern Europe and Australia, creating one of the largest diasporas in the world.
- Italy's Many Diasporas — Donna R. Gabaccia, UCL Press (2000)
- Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month: October 2023 — U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Census Bureau (2023)
- The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796 — Christopher Duggan, Allen Lane (2007)
Poverty, land hunger, rising population and the crisis of southern agriculture drove one of the great migrations in history. Italian statistics recorded about 14 million departures between 1876 and 1914 alone, and some 26 million over the century to the 1970s, though many left more than once and perhaps a third or more eventually came home. Early emigrants came mostly from the north-east; from the 1890s, southerners and Sicilians dominated.
- Italy's Many Diasporas — Donna R. Gabaccia, UCL Press (2000)
They went to the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, to France, Switzerland and Germany, and after 1945 to Belgium’s coal mines (262 men, 136 of them Italian, died at Marcinelle in 1956), Germany’s factories and Australia. About 16 million Americans report Italian ancestry today, and by most estimates Argentina and Brazil have even larger Italian-descended populations, though counts there are rough.
- Italy's Many Diasporas — Donna R. Gabaccia, UCL Press (2000)
- Italian-American Heritage and Culture Month: October 2023 — U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Census Bureau (2023)
Why it matters today
Almost every Italian family has relatives in Buenos Aires, New York, São Paulo, Melbourne or Belgium. The diaspora shaped Italy as much as Italy shaped it: emigrants' money built houses back home, and Italian food, music and saints' festivals took root around the world. Memories of being the despised immigrants, called "dagos" and "wops", colour how some Italians see today's migrants arriving across the Mediterranean.