Italy's Many Diasporas

Donna R. Gabaccia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781857285833
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134226054
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Italy's residents are a migratory people. Since 1800 well over 27 million left home, but over half also returned home again. As cosmopolitans, exiles, and 'workers of the world' they transformed their homeland and many of the countries where they worked or settled abroad. But did they form a diaspora? Migrants maintained firm ties to native villages, cities and families. Few felt much loyalty to a larger nation of Italians. Rather than form a 'nation unbound,' the transnational lives of Italy's migrants kept alive international regional cultures that challenged the hegemony of national states around the world. This ambitious and theoretically innovative overview examines the social, cultural and economic integration of Italian migrants. It explores their complex yet distinctive identity and their relationship with their homeland taking a comprehensive approach.

1

BEFORE ITALIANS: MAKING ITALIAN CULTURE AT HOME AND ABROAD

E tanti sun li Zenoexi

e per lo modo si’destexi

che und’eli van e stan

un’altra Zenoa ge fan.

(So many are the Genoese, scattered worldwide, that they build other Genoas wherever they reside.)¹

In European languages, a nation (nazione in modern Italian) is a people sharing a sense of common origins, history, language, or culture. To the vernacular poet of the Middle Ages (above), the Genoese were a people (a natio, he might have called them).² Genoa had its own language that resembled Catalan (of northern Spain) as much as modern Italian. It had its own government, too — a republic. Genoa was a city state, a political form typical of the European late Middle Ages and much smaller than the larger nation (or national) states that developed later. Thus, most English speakers today would call the Genoese an ethnic or regional group. But in other languages, and in Balkan Europe today, groups no larger or culturally more distinct than the Genoese assert claims as nations to their own states.

In the days of our vernacular poet, Italy was neither a nation nor a state, but a “geographic expansion” — a peninsula that divided the Mediterranean into two halves. There were no Italians living there.³ The noun “Italian” (originally from the Latin italicus) had been a label outsiders applied to many peoples of the Roman Empire centuries before. (These same peoples, even under Rome, called themselves something else — Etruschi, Sanniti, Liguri, Veneti, Galli, etc.) The term “Italian” largely disappeared from Italy as the Roman Empire shattered. By the year 1200, dozens of city states divided Italy’s North and much of its center. Near the center of the peninsula, Rome was the seat of a universal church with close, if conflictual, ties to a Holy Roman Empire ruled politically from France or Germany. It still claimed the loyalties of all Christians although it had already lost the orthodox Christians of the Balkans, Greece, and the eastern Mediterranean. Along its southern coasts and islands were the western territories of the Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, ruled from Constantinople. Elsewhere in the South and nearby islands, centuries of Arab, Catalan, and Norman invasions produced ever-changing puzzles of interlocking colonial pieces. While the Arabs who dominated much of the Mediterranean saw the inhabitants of Italy along with other Europeans as Franks or Latins, human identities in 1200 in Italy were instead local.⁴ Italians never called their group of immediate kinsmen a natio, and they most commonly identified with their hometown, calling it their patria (literally, fatherland) or paese (village), not their natio. A noteworthy departure from an imperial past, Italy’s political fragmentation in 1200 was nevertheless typical of all of western Europe at the time.

But 550 years later, Italy had diverged sharply from its northern and western neighbors. Its inhabitants had not evolved into a single nation with a national state. The inhabitants of Spain, Portugal, and France had arguably formed nations already in 1500; the formation of a united nation of Britain, incorporating Ireland and Scotland, occurred between 1690 and 1707. By contrast, Italy, along with Germany, remained fragmented, and they did not create nation states until the second half of the nineteenth century.⁵

Still, both the identities and the political boundaries of Italy had changed in the intervening centuries. By the time of the French Revolution, four duchies (Milan, Tuscany, Parma, Modena) and four nominally republican city states (Genoa, Venice, Lucca, San Marino) dominated much of northern and central Italy. Three larger dynastic states (Savoy — later the Kingdom of Sardinia — of the northwest, the Papal States of the center, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the South) divided the rest of the peninsula and linked it to nearby islands. City states had given way to larger territorial units, to regional dialects, and to “nations” of Sicilians, Tuscans, and Marchegiani (from the Marches along the Adriatic Sea).

While migration did not cause either Italy’s political fragmentation or its gradual evolution from city states to regional dynasties, the mobility of its residents certainly influenced the long and complex process of nation-building on the peninsula. When residents of Italy left home for long periods, or traveled long distances — as did the merchant mariners of Genoa — they often lived with former neighbors and called themselves a natio for the first time. When artists and architects left Italy to build and to decorate the courts and churches of Europe, they instead gave new meaning to the term Italian (“of Italy”). Long-distance migrations produced the first of Italy’s diasporas — of missionaries and merchants, artists and musicians, and of the nations of Genoese, Lombards, and Florentines — without producing a united Italian nation or a politically united Italy.

Surprisingly, the residents of Italy exercised their greatest cultural influence on the wider world while they were most divided. Educated Europeans by 1500 recognized the existence of a distinctive civiltà italiana (civilization or culture originating in Italy).⁶ They admired Italian art, music, science, architecture, humanist scholarship, and urban pleasures. Civiltà italiana changed Europe’s place in the world, contributing to an economic and cultural renaissance of a once moribund and backward west.⁷

Historians have long extolled Italy’s formative influence on European civilization, with Jacques Le Goff referring to the “waves of italianism” rolling periodically out of the peninsula. Fernand Braudel instead saw Italy radiating “its splendid thousand-colored light well beyond its own confines.”⁸ While striking, these images are misleading: ideas rarely travel independently of people. Civiltà italiana effectively exercised its civilizing influence precisely because so many migrants carried it from their hometowns to the courts, marketplaces, and universities across the mountains and seas that surround Italy. Their diasporas cast long shadows over all subsequent migrations from Italy and over all Italian interpretations of them.

From Italian primacy to “the Indies of the court of Vienna”

In the year 1000, western Europe was a backwater (“the land of the Franks on the western seas,” as the Arabs saw it) on the periphery of a commercial economy centered in the Mediterranean.⁹ There, the Arab caliphates of North Africa competed with the Byzantine Empire to control access (via “oriental” overland routes and the Indian Ocean) to the older, richer, and more politically advanced civilizations of South and East Asia.¹⁰ After 1000, Italy became the geographic hinge on which economic and cultural innovation shifted gradually from east to west.¹¹ From 1200 to about 1500, Italy’s city states played central roles in creating a new, dynamic economy around the Mediterranean. Its commercial cities of Venice (on the Adriatic) and Genoa (on the Tyrrhenian Sea) battled to control shipping and trade, and to acquire colonies or influence in both halves of the Mediterranean. Cities like Milan and Florence became important centers for banking, industry, and trading with transalpine Europe. These were the years of Italy’s primacy, both culturally and economically.¹²

Historians debate when to date the onset of Italy’s decline into economic stagnation and political dependency,¹³ but the years between 1450 and 1550 seem a reasonable choice. Beginning in the 1400s, newly important dynasties in north and western Europe began to send explorers and traders (not a few of them from Italy) out into the Atlantic. They created both global empires for themselves and a new, and Europe-centered, world economy.¹⁴ Unlike those of Amsterdam and the city states of the North Sea Hanseatic League, the merchants of Venice did not venture far out into the Atlantic. Nor did the residents of Italy coalesce into a larger nation around a single dynasty. Unlike Spain, Portugal, France, or England, none of Italy’s many peoples built a sizeable mercantilist empire aimed at extracting and transferring the wealth of far-flung colonies. While other European nations conquered native civilizations in the Americas and enslaved Africans to work there, Italy became a minor dependency in Spain’s and France’s global empires. By 1700, Austria’s European and dynastic, but nevertheless imperial, policies shaped life in much of Italy. Italy’s transformation was astonishing: a late medieval metropole, it became an early modern dependency, the Austrian counterpart of Dutch and British colonies in the Indies. This transformation shaped the making of civiltà italiana, the migrations that spread it through the world, and the formation of nations in Italy itself.

Civiltà italiana first emerged during the period of economic expansion and relative political independence in Italy that historians of economy and politics label Europe’s first commercial revolution. Italy was at the heart, and its residents became the key mediators, of an international economy centered on the Mediterranean but still drawing on the wealth and learning of the eastern Mediterranean Levant (or “Orient”), India, and China. Engaged in the slave trade, the spice trade, and the cloth trade, the merchants of Venice purchased Asian and local products from their Arab and Byzantine neighbors in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. They and their fellows then transported these goods, along with goods produced in Italy, to western and transalpine Europe, just emerging from its own Dark Ages.¹⁵ Undoubtedly geography helps explain Italy’s important mediating role. As a peninsula, it stretched almost to Africa, facing both the eastern and western shores of the Mediterranean; it was also the Mediterranean terminus to the most important Alpine passages from the north and west of the European sub-continent.

Italy’s growing economic power emerged from its cities, largely — though not exclusively — in its northern and central sections.¹⁶ Sea power made mariners and then merchants of the Genoese, Venetians, Pisans, and (in the South) Amalfitani; other cities like Messina, Milan, and Florence successfully transformed small-scale production into flourishing export industries in silk, metallurgy, arms, and woolen cloth. Genoa, Florence, Milan, and Venice specialized in banking. Rome, while widely recognized as the center of universal Catholicism, and of an alternative, central, and western but religious, culture, remained apart from most of these economic changes. The Papacy was in turmoil in the late Middle Ages — with popes reigning from France for part of the period. Before engaging in the missionary expansion that accompanied the building of European empires, several generations of Catholic clerics first had to struggle against the Germanic rulers of the Holy Roman Empire to speak unchallenged as heads of a united Christendom in western Europe.

Economic and urban growth in Italy went hand in hand. Cities expanded largely because of continuous in-migration from the countryside. However economically attractive, Italy’s cities were unhealthy places; death rates remained high and urban populations seemed unable to reproduce themselves. Peasants and rural craftsmen plotted their moves to cities flourishing behind protective walls. City walls symbolized urbanites’ desire to keep peasants in the countryside so they could feed the city. From longer distances, foreigners also arrived seeking their fortunes. The Genoese and Lombards went to Sicily, for example, while the Pisans traveled to Sardinia. Migrants arrived from other parts of Europe, too. German artisans and merchants attracted attention in Florence and Venice. Venice also drew most of its domestic servants from a market in the nearby Balkans, while Sicily attracted permanent settlers (Albanians or Greeks) who fled the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire conquered it. Overall, Italy was more a land of immigration than of emigration, and its commercial and industrializing cities were its main attraction.¹⁷

Italy’s powerful merchants valued their city homes highly, and viewed them as the ultimate earthly expressions of human genius. City dwellers contrasted the civiltà, or civilization of urban life, to the beastly life of peasants in the countryside.¹⁸ Peasants seemed part of the natural vegetation of the countryside, one historian later noted. Even in the more feudal South, where land mattered more than commerce as a source of wealth, the wealthy preferred life in urban courts to isolated castles. This sharp cultural division between urban and rural Italy shaped the peninsula’s life and politics into the 1970s, separating the residents of Italy into two peoples who often seemed as different as two races.¹⁹

Even more than economic power, the concentration of political power in urban hands defined Italy’s civiltà. In the republican communes of the center and North of Italy, merchants, industrialists, and skilled workers ruled. Political conflicts were endemic in a land of local loyalties. Italy’s northern city states bristled with the towers that symbolized families’ prestige and strength; they provided a safe retreat when kin groups engaged in armed conflict with each other. Deadly quarrels broke out between quarters or parishes within a single commune. City governments ended expressions of internal conflict by abolishing (and razing) family towers, and by transforming parish conflicts into games and sporting competitions. Over time, the communal patria consolidated its monopoly over both governance and the use of arms.²⁰

Still, political strife remained rancorous and intense. Throughout the late Middle Ages local (Guelf) supporters of the Papacy distrusted local (Ghibelline) supporters of the Holy Roman Emperor, even when neither was intimately involved in imperial politics. Unimportant clients of a Guelf local strongman battled the followers of his Ghibelline counterpart. Violent wars between communes were also the rule. The century-long hatred by Genoese of Venetians originated in economic competition, while Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Arezzo more often battled as they sought control over neighboring territories in Tuscany. Republican governance rarely survived unmodified for long. After 1200, charismatic leaders — called variously despots, dukes, and signori — built dynasties (signorie, principati) that replaced most republican governments.²¹

Political fragmentation and pride in one’s city homeland spurred furious competition in cultural creativity, contributing significantly to the development, character, and perfection of civiltà italiana. Like Italy’s city dwellers, civiltà italiana had many origins. Italy’s merchants contributed the techniques of modern commerce and trade (from double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit to modes of ship construction). Its Catholic clerics and universities introduced scholarship, law, and administrative theories during, first, Catholic and, later, humanist academic revivals. Love for the city of one’s birth, the patria, also associated civiltà italiana wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of tables
• Foreword by the Series Editor
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Before Italians: making Italian culture at home and abroad
• 2 Making Italians at home and abroad, 1790–1893
• 3 Workers of the world, 1870–1914
• 4 Transnationalism as a way of working-class life
• 5 Nationalism and internationalism in Italy’s proletarian diasporas, 1870–1914
• 6 Nation, empire, and diaspora: fascism and its opponents
• 7 Postwar Italy: from sending to receiving nation
• 8 Civiltà italiana and the making of multi-ethnic nations
• Notes
• Index