This is a book of thousands of stories, names and family names of those that flew from the Apennine mountains of Bologna and Modena – between 1885 and 1915 – to the US and were part of the exodus known as the Great Italian Emigration. Swarms of men, women and children who, out of sheer lack of a decent living, moved from villages like Gaggio Montano, Fanano, Montese, Lizzano in Belvedere and Sestola, to labor in the American Midwest of Illinois and Oklahoma. These mountain villagers found themselves in the prairies crossed by rivers and valleys like the stunning Spoon River valley, but their lives were anything but idyllic. They toiled, suffered and sometimes paid with their lives as they tried to support families both in America and back in their homeland. The majority of them went down the bowels of the earth, digging and excavating “black diamonds” from the coal mines with their bare hands and tools. Many of them stayed and forged new lives, contributing to America’s melting pot; others, such as Vittorio Ardeni (the grandfather of the author), returned to Italy. And all of them were exposed to the ruthless capitalism of the Industrial Age that saw them as nothing more than cheap, dirty, soulless hands only apt to work. And yet, thanks to their struggle and sacrifice, their were able to contribute to the great leap of both the US and Italy into an era of increased wealth and improved living conditions.
The work presented here is the result of years of research into the archives of Italy and the US, including the Immigration Records and the Passenger Lists at Ellis Island, the National Archive and Record Administration (NARA) files, the American Census data, the Naturalization and Passport applications, various on-line archives and even the church and population archives in the parishes and municipalities of Italy. The research has been enriched by interviews with the direct descendants of the immigrants and their collections of photographs, documents and letters.

The author

Pier Giorgio Ardeni (born in Rome in 1959), a historian and economist, is a Professor of Development Economics at the University of Bologna, where he first graduated. He studied at Berkeley, California, and then spent time in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe working for international organizations and governments in several countries. His research activity has focused on the determinants of development, the history and patterns of migration at the local and national level, the Second World War and the resistance movement in the Italian Apennines, the economic history of Italy, the recent surge in populism, economic inequality and social structure. His recent books include Cento ragazzi e un capitano. La brigata Giustizia e Libertà “Montagna” e la Resistenza sui monti dell’alto Reno tra storia e memoria (Pendragon, Bologna, 2016), on the resistance movement on the mountains of Bologna and Modena; Le radici del populismo. Disuguaglianze e consenso elettorale in Italia (Laterza, Bari-Roma, 2020) on the origins of populism in Italy; Il ritorno della storia. La crisi ecologica, la pandemia e l’irruzione della natura (Castelvecchi, Roma, 2022) on how the pandemics and the ecological crisis are upending our understanding of progress.