Italian Heritage Travel

Understanding the World Your Family Left and the One To Which It Came

A People, Not a Nation

Over 15 million Americans today can trace their heritage back to Italy. Between 1880 and 1924, when the US slammed the door shut on those seeking entry from southern and eastern Europe, more than four million from Europe’s “boot” emigrated to the US. Because of significant regional variations in culture, dialects, and socio-economic conditions, many would not have even thought of themselves as “Italians,” a category imposed on them from the outside. The formal unification of the country in 1861, did not overcome vast differences socio-cultural and socio-economic variation within the population.

But while a Sicilian and Tuscan may have found each other unintelligible due to linguistic differences, both would have been fleeing varying degrees of poverty and punishing, dangerous labor. These future Americans worked Italy’s sulfur mines, picked tomatoes, quarried marble from mountains, and generally speaking, scraped out a meager existence, more or less severe.

The Italy Only History Can See

The Italy that we all want to visit today was not the everyday reality for masses of people. The southern parts of the country, from which a large percentage emigrated, was caught in a semi-feudal past, in which large landlords owned vast amounts of property, middlemen who leased their lands extracted massive rents and debt payments from poor peasants, ordinary people were expected to bow and scrape before their betters, and political violence was directed against those who resisted. In the South, most of the rural population was illiterate, a fact that is significant for historians, genealogists, and descendants who are attempting to trace family stories and reconstruct the historical record. Often there is an absence of documents—letters, for instance—not because they were lost, but because they were never written.

While there is a common conception in the US that the country’s Italian migrants overwhelmingly originated in the south, this is not true. As many as 1/3 of those who came to the US were from central and northern regions of Italy—that is around the latitude of Rome and higher. Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Piedmont, and Veneto all contributed their share of the US’ Italian immigrants. The reasons they left were often distinctive from their southern cousins. In many cases, skilled craftsmen and artisans, sought after in the American labor market, found new opportunities across the Atlantic. In other instances, agricultural crises, overpopulation, and the absence of plots of lands large enough to secure a living drove people to leave.

“Americans” in Italy

Many, however, went back. Nearly half of all Italian immigrants, “birds of passage,” returned permanently to Italy after coming to the US. Others engaging in circular migration—departing Italy, working in the US, returning to Italy, departing again. Often it was a question of bring resources home to a family. In other cases, it was a matter of starting a family. Because larger numbers of men emigrated than women, a gender imbalance emerged in the US—finding a wife required going home. Those who returned were known in Italy as “Americans.”

Historians debate whether Italian immigrants who stayed in the US were fully “uprooted”—torn out of their previous worlds and deposited in a new one, with their ties to the older reality largely severed—or “transplanted”—moved to another place but with their traditions and communities intact, albeit changed. Others argue that Italian immigrants had a transnational existence, never fully committing to either world.

Standing at the Intersection of History and Biography

The standard representations of Italian-American culture that find their way into mass media, pop culture, and even sometimes families’ understanding of themselves, capture little of the historical reality and its complexity. They tend to plow over the most compelling parts of the immigrant experience and what followed, explaining neither the Italy people left, nor the America to which they came, nor the intersection of the two. Thus, the TV show the Sopranos never gets much beyond mafia violence and baked ziti. In Lady and the Tramp, two dogs fall in love over a bowl of spaghetti.

The discovery of pasts is fascinating and moving. When people are trying to explore their Italian heritage, they are trying to stand at the intersection of history and biography. This is not easy to do. It takes real knowledge.

What many heritage travel companies provide is not an opportunity to be at that crossroads, but glam visits of Italy with a bit of talk about grandma’s meatballs. Such trips have little to do with what actually happened and offer little insight into why. A luxury, “bespoke” vacation to your family’s homeland may bring you to a geographic location relevant to your past, but it will not bring you to a moment, a place in history, nor is it intended to.