Speaker details migration of Italians
While Italy has a population of only 58 million people, the influence of Italians is felt all over the globe. Thanks to migration, there are 60 million people outside Italy with Italian descent, and while many of them live in the United States, they can be found all over the globe.
“Migration has always been a way of life for Italians,” said Rudolph Vecoli, a professor of history and director of the Immigration History Research at the University of Minnesota.
Vecoli was one of the guest speakers this week at the Fifth Senator Rush Holt History Conference at West Virginia University in Morgantown, W.Va. One of the nation’s most prominent authorities on European migration and ethnicity in America, he has had several articles published by the Smithsonian Institute Press.
In his speech, “The Italian Global Diaspora,” Vecoli pondered the statement “Tutto il mondo e paese,” or “All the world is my home.”
Vecoli said Italians migrated not only to northern Europe and North America but also to South America and even Australia and Africa.
About 26 million Italians left their homeland between 1876 and 1976 because of poverty and inflation, he said. Most of the people that left were poor, and they left in hopes of making money in the promised land and returning to Italy again to buy land, Vecoli said.
But, many Italians found out it wasn’t that easy, he noted. Many were disappointed with the work they found in other countries, and second generations began to rebel. About half returned to Italy, but some ended up staying in their new homes, which created a scattering of the Italian culture worldwide, said Vecoli.
Food is one of the most prevalent traditions of Italian culture, Vecoli said, sipping from his Sbarro cup. Italian restaurants are found across the globe. He mentioned that on a trip to Brazil, he had a “nice Italian meal,” but the culture was missing, because many of the Italian-Brazilians had assimilated.
“Food is the last thing, maybe, to be lost,” Vecoli said.
But, that is the point of his lecture, he said: Italian culture is rich and should be continued by the new generations of Italian-Americans and other Italian hyphens around the world.
“There are more vital and creative forces at work among Italian-Americans of the new generation than ever before,” Vecoli said.
The theme of the Holt conference this year was “On the Move: Migration and the Reconstruction of Cultural Identity.” The conference is sponsored by WVU through the Senator Rush Holt Endowment, the Department of History and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. The West Virginia Humanities Council is a co-sponsor of the conference, and the WVU Committee for the Preservation of Italian-American History and Culture was a co-sponsor of Vecoli’s lecture.
The Senator Rush Holt History Conference is held biennially at West Virginia University in memory of the U.S. senator who represented the state from 1935 to 1941 and the father of Rush D. Holt, a U.S. congressman representing New Jersey’s 12th District.