The Great Italian Exodus

Leaving Italy in the 1890s for a better life.

Ever wonder why so many Italians said, Arrivederci! to their homeland and ventured off to the New World? Was it because many truly believed the streets of America were paved with gold? Please. that would mean Italy was a nation filled with gullible idiots... which it wasn't.

 Italians who left their country did so for a variety of personal reasons -- Okay. Maybe some of them did think the streets were paved with gold in America; every village has its idiot(s) -- with the most common reasons being poverty, disease (a major outbreak of cholera in Naples took place in the 1880s) and unfair land management practices. (Many who left were farmers and because of those practices couldn't earn a decent living off the land.)  If there was a single event, however, which prompted the exodus of so many Italians, it was the unification of Italy in 1861.

Before the unification of Italy, the country that is now Italy was composed of city states and small independent nations. It had been that way since the Middle Ages. Naples, for instance, was a city state, a powerful one, but when the country unified, Naples became just another city amongst many cities in one country.

Kentucky Pizza in Buenos Aires. Wait! What? Kentucky Pizza???

The Italian exodus is referred to as the "Italian Diaspora."  Diaspora comes from a Greek word which means scattering or dispersion. That's what many Italians did from the 1880s through about 1920: They dispersed and scattered.  Many, of course, dispersed to America. But America wasn't the only destination for Italians leaving the boot.

Quite a few Italians scattered to other parts of Europe. Some to North Africa. Still more dispersed to South America -- mostly to Argentina and Uruguay -- which means, I suppose, that you can get a decent pizza in Buenos Aires. The Italian Diaspora to America was, of course, the destination for millions of Italians. It was the #1 destination for those who participated in the great Italian exodus. My grandparents were amongst those who chose America as their destination. It's probably the same for many of you reading this.

The greatest numbers of Italians who left Italy for the New World came from the south of the country, especially from 1880 to 1920.  During that time, more than 9,000,000 Italians -- many, if not most, from places like Naples and the Campania region, Calabria, and Sicily -- headed across the Atlantic to the Americas. That's a lot of Italians!

If you're an Italian-American, you likely owe your status as such, directly or indirectly, to the unification of Italy in 1861. Unification sounds like a good thing, and in some ways, perhaps many ways, it probably was. But not in enough ways to keep millions of Italians from leaving home and dispersing and scattering to other places on the planet where many of them prospered.