Why Italians Left Italy: Hunger, Poverty, and the Roots of Italian American Immigration

The Rural Reality That Pushed Millions of Italians Toward Emigration

“They did not leave Italy because they stopped loving it. Many left because they loved their families enough to risk leaving it.”

The Italy Our Ancestors Left Behind

For anyone tracing an Italian American family tree, there eventually comes a moment when a name on a passenger list becomes more than a name. A village appears. A province. A farm, a workshop, a parish, or a small house somewhere in Italy. And then comes the question that every family historian eventually asks: Why did they leave?
Italian mass emigration—especially between the 1870s and the years before World War I—did not emerge from a single cause. Poverty, limited access to land, population pressure, seasonal unemployment, agricultural crises, taxation, regional inequality, and the hope of earning a better living all played a role. But behind many departures was a harsh rural reality that is difficult to understand from the distance of several generations: hunger was not simply an occasional hardship. For many rural families, it was a permanent threat.
The newly unified Kingdom of Italy inherited enormous economic and social inequalities. Conditions differed greatly from one region to another, but across much of rural Italy, small farmers, sharecroppers, agricultural laborers, and landless families lived with inadequate housing, poor nutrition, disease, and extremely high infant mortality.
One of the most important attempts to document these conditions was the Jacini Agricultural Inquiry, begun in 1877 and carried out over the following years. Its investigations recorded the condition of agriculture and rural society throughout the new Italian state. For descendants of Italian immigrants today, these reports offer something more valuable than statistics: they help us imagine the world in which our ancestors made decisions that would change the lives of their descendants forever.

One Room for People and Animals

In parts of rural Italy, especially among the poorest agricultural families, the home could consist of a single cramped room with inadequate ventilation, little light, and poor sanitation. In some communities, human beings and domestic animals shared the same structure.
Cattle, goats, pigs, and chickens were not simply possessions. They were part of the household economy. A cow could provide milk and labor. A pig could represent food for months. Chickens provided eggs. Losing an animal could mean losing part of the family's ability to survive.
In the coldest months, keeping animals close to the living quarters also provided warmth. What may seem shocking to a modern reader was, in some places, a practical response to poverty and climate.
The rural house was therefore not simply a home. It could be bedroom, kitchen, workshop, storage room, and shelter for animals—all within a few square yards.
This was not the universal experience of every Italian family. Italy had prosperous farmers, merchants, artisans, landowners, and growing urban middle classes. But for families living at the bottom of the rural economy, such conditions were very real.

The Stable as the Center of Family Life

For some impoverished farming families, the stable or animal shelter became the warmest and most functional part of the household.
People slept there, worked there, ate there, repaired tools, spun thread, mended clothing, and passed the long winter evenings. Children grew up surrounded by the sounds and smells of animals because there was simply no other space.
Women might sew, spin, prepare food, or care for children. Men repaired agricultural tools, worked with animals, or talked with neighbors and relatives. Older generations passed down stories, prayers, memories, and practical knowledge.
For Italian Americans researching their ancestry today, it is easy to look at an ancestral village and imagine a picturesque landscape of vineyards, stone houses, church bells, and family traditions. Those things existed. But behind the picturesque landscape was also a world of hard physical labor and material scarcity.
The village that appears beautiful in an old photograph could be a place where survival depended on a few acres of land, a cow, a harvest that could fail, or wages earned during a few months of seasonal work.

Polenta and Pellagra: When Food Was Not Enough

Among poor rural populations, food was often monotonous and nutritionally inadequate. In parts of northern Italy, cornmeal polenta became a dietary staple because corn was relatively inexpensive and available.
But a diet dominated by poorly prepared maize, with insufficient protein and other nutrients, could contribute to pellagra, a devastating nutritional disease associated with niacin deficiency. Its symptoms could include dermatitis, diarrhea, neurological problems, and, in advanced cases, severe mental deterioration.
Pellagra became particularly serious in parts of northern Italy, including areas of Veneto and Lombardy. The disease became so closely associated with rural poverty that its presence became one of the clearest indicators of nutritional deprivation.
Accounts from the period describe extraordinary forms of scarcity. In some households, families tried to add flavor to plain polenta by passing it over a single piece of salted or smoked fish, allowing everyone to share whatever flavor remained.
For a modern Italian American family, accustomed to thinking of polenta as part of a rich culinary tradition, this history can be difficult to reconcile. But food traditions often have two histories: one of celebration and one of survival.
Polenta could be both.

Wine as Food

In wine-producing areas of northern Italy, including Veneto and Lombardy, wine was also incorporated into everyday rural life. It was sometimes regarded not merely as a beverage but as part of the diet. The expression “Il vino fa sangue”—“Wine makes blood”—reflected an older belief that wine strengthened the body.
Children were sometimes introduced to wine at an early age.
This should not be interpreted simply through the modern concept of recreational drinking. In poor rural communities, alcohol could become part of a diet already distorted by inadequate nutrition and limited alternatives.
Historical investigations from the period recorded widespread alcohol consumption among rural populations. The figures vary according to the population studied and the methods used, but the broader pattern is unmistakable: poverty, inadequate nutrition, hard physical labor, and alcohol were often intertwined.
The romantic image of wine as an inseparable part of Italian village life hides another reality. For some families, alcohol was not a symbol of abundance or pleasure. It was part of a precarious existence.

Abandoned Children and the Women Who Nursed Them

Extreme poverty also affected the most intimate bonds of family life.
Across nineteenth-century Italy, abandoned infants could be left at foundling institutions, church entrances, the homes of priests, or with midwives. In many places, the ruota degli esposti, or foundling wheel, allowed an infant to be anonymously surrendered to an institution.
These children were often extremely vulnerable. Malnutrition, infectious disease, and inadequate medical care contributed to very high infant mortality.
Women who worked as wet nurses sometimes took abandoned infants into their homes. For poor women, nursing another family's child could provide desperately needed income. But the arrangement also carried serious risks. Illnesses could be transmitted between mother and child, and a wet nurse might be forced to return an infant if she feared for the health of her own children.
Some abandoned children remained under institutional care for years. Their lives were divided according to stages of dependency, first requiring milk and later food, shelter, and labor.
Behind the official terminology of hospitals and charitable institutions were real children whose identities could disappear from the historical record.
For genealogists, this matters enormously.
An Italian American who reaches a dead end in a family tree may sometimes discover terms such as figlio di ignoti, esposto, or figlio della Madonna in nineteenth-century records. These were not merely bureaucratic labels. They represented children whose origins had been obscured by poverty, abandonment, death, illegitimacy, or circumstances that their descendants may never fully recover.

When an Animal Was Worth More Than a Child

Accounts by physicians and observers of rural northern Italy reveal how poverty could alter the priorities of a family.
This does not mean that parents did not love their children. Quite the opposite: affection existed within a brutal economic system that forced impossible choices.
A cow, ox, or goat could represent the family's food, income, transportation, agricultural labor, or future security. A sick animal could therefore threaten the survival of everyone in the household.
A sick child, particularly one too young to work, could represent another kind of crisis—one that the family might not have the means to address.
Medical treatment cost money. Doctors might live far away. Medicines were expensive. Transportation was difficult. Rural families often relied on traditional remedies, neighbors, midwives, and local knowledge because professional medical care was simply beyond their reach.
The result could be a painful paradox: the loss of an animal might provoke immediate economic panic, while the illness of a child could be met with resignation.
That was not a measure of love.
It was a measure of poverty.

Disease, Hygiene, and a Slowly Changing Italy

Italy did not remain frozen in this condition.
During the nineteenth century and especially around the turn of the twentieth, improvements in public health, sanitation, medical knowledge, vaccination, nutrition, transportation, and access to education gradually began changing Italian society.
The legacy of earlier administrations, including the Austrian administration in Veneto before Italian unification, also included important institutional and public-health developments. But progress was uneven, and the benefits of modernization did not reach every rural family at the same speed.
Infant and child mortality remained devastatingly high well into the twentieth century.
The statistics tell a story that family photographs cannot. A village could have a beautiful church, vineyards, orchards, stone houses, and close-knit families while still losing large numbers of children to disease and malnutrition.
This is one reason the demographic history of Italian immigration matters so much.
When millions of Italians left between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, they were not simply responding to an abstract desire for adventure. Many were responding to a world in which the margin between a modest harvest and hunger could be dangerously thin.

Why They Left

For descendants of Italian immigrants in the United States, the phrase “Why did my ancestors leave Italy?” often begins with a name and ends with a story.
The answer was rarely one thing.
Perhaps there was too little land.
Perhaps the family had accumulated debts.
Perhaps a father had no reliable work.
Perhaps a harvest had failed.
Perhaps a son had already gone to America and sent money home.
Perhaps a recruiter described wages in the United States.
Perhaps a neighbor returned from America wearing better clothes and carrying money.
Perhaps the family simply could not see a future where it was.
For many, emigration was not a romantic adventure. It was a calculated risk.
The journey itself could be frightening. The ocean was vast. The destination was uncertain. Language, customs, work, and living conditions were unfamiliar. Yet remaining could also mean watching children grow up with the same hunger, debt, and uncertainty that had shaped their parents' lives.
So they left.
They crossed the Atlantic carrying little more than clothing, documents, religious objects, photographs, tools, recipes, memories, and hope.
Some arrived in New York and continued into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, or other parts of the United States. Others went to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Canada, Australia, or elsewhere in the Americas.
They did not all leave for the same reason, and they did not all experience the same kind of poverty. But behind countless departures was the same fundamental question:
Could life be better somewhere else?
For millions of Italians, the answer was worth the risk.

The Italy Behind Your Family Tree

Today, an Italian American descendant may know only a surname and a village: a great-grandfather from Treviso, a grandmother from Veneto, a family name from Lombardy, Piedmont, Sicily, Calabria, Campania, or Abruzzo.
Behind that name was a human being who lived inside a very specific historical world.
Understanding that world changes the meaning of genealogy.
The passenger list is no longer simply a document. The village is no longer merely a location. The immigration date is no longer just a line in a database.
It becomes part of a decision made by someone who had to weigh everything familiar against everything unknown.
Our ancestors did not leave Italy because they stopped loving it.
Many left because they loved their families enough to risk leaving it.
And that distinction matters.
The United States became home to millions of Italians and their descendants. Their descendants built neighborhoods, churches, businesses, farms, workshops, restaurants, unions, families, and communities. They preserved dialects, recipes, religious traditions, family names, and memories while creating lives that their ancestors could scarcely have imagined.
The story of Italian immigration therefore begins neither at Ellis Island nor at the moment a ship disappeared over the horizon.
It begins much earlier—in the villages, fields, kitchens, stables, workshops, and crowded homes of nineteenth-century Italy.
That is where the decision to leave was first made.
And that is where many Italian American family stories truly begin.

Author's Note

I have spent more than thirty years working with Italian-descendant families and researching the history of Italian immigration and family origins. Over those decades, I have heard thousands of family stories—stories of departure, poverty, sacrifice, separation, survival, and the difficult search for a better future.
This article is intended as a historical contribution for descendants who are trying to understand not only where their Italian ancestors came from, but why they left.
The nineteenth-century rural experience was not identical throughout Italy. Conditions varied considerably by region, province, occupation, landholding, and family circumstances. The purpose here is not to portray every Italian family as destitute, but to illuminate the severe conditions experienced by a substantial part of the rural population during the decades that produced one of the largest migrations in modern history.
When an Italian American discovers an ancestor's name on a passenger list, it is easy to see only the destination. History invites us to look in the opposite direction—to the village, the poverty, the family, and the difficult decision that came before the voyage.
Behind every name was a life.
And behind many of those lives was a reason to leave.

Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta
Author and researcher of Italian immigration and family history