The Suitcase That Carried Italy Across the Sea
There was a time when leaving was not a choice. It was almost a sentence. A man would look at the small house where he had been born, at the church whose bell he had known since boyhood, at the fields that could no longer feed the family, and understand, with a sadness he might not even have been able to name, that he had to go. That is how the story of millions of Italians began. There were no colorful maps, no hotel photographs, no tickets bought online, and no certainty that anyone would be waiting at the other end. There was a cardboard suitcase, a few clothes, carefully folded papers, and often a piece of bread for the journey. The suitcase was tied with string because you had to trust the knot more than the cardboard itself. Inside it fit nearly everything they owned. And above all, it held hope. The train pulled away slowly. Someone stayed behind on the platform. A mother raised her arm. A son tried to look brave. A white handkerchief appeared at the window. Perhaps no one knew when they would see each other again. Perhaps never. And there was the bell tower. As the train moved on, the church steeple grew smaller behind the trees, then disappeared around a bend. It was only a tower, others might have said. But to that man it was his entire childhood. It was Sunday, the Mass, the smell of the kitchen at home, his mother’s voice, his friends, the family dead buried in the little cemetery. It was the land where his surname had begun. Then came the sea. And the sea was not just water. It was a border. On the other side lay America, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and so many other places where people said there was work and land. Simple words for those who stayed. Enormous words for those who left. Many arrived in Brazil after a long crossing. Some went to the big cities. Others followed the agricultural colonies in the South. They climbed hills, cut paths through the brush, planted corn, wheat, and grapes. They built houses with their own hands. They raised chapels. They founded communities. They gave familiar names to the places where they began again. And almost all of them discovered that the new life was not easy. There was hard labor, homesickness, a strange language, illness, poverty, and distance. There were nights when the silence felt larger than the house. There were children being born far from the land of their grandparents, and men growing old without ever stopping thinking of the village where they had been boys. But there was also hope. It was hope that made a man rise before the sun. It was hope that made a woman save every coin. It was hope that turned a small planting into a piece of the future. Every brick set into the wall of a new house carried a little of the Italy left behind. Every vine planted in Brazilian soil held some memory of the hills of the Veneto, Friuli, Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany, or whichever region that family had come from. And then came the letters. Ah, the letters. A sheet of paper crossed oceans carrying news from one family to another. It was read many times. Perhaps it was placed in a drawer and taken out again on Sunday. The words grew worn from being touched so often. After that came the money. The small amount sent home regularly did not seem like much to those who received it. But to the one who worked far away it represented days of effort, calloused hands, cold, longing, and sacrifice. It was money to buy a piece of land. To build a house. To pay for a child’s schooling. To help the parents. To make sure that one day the family might live a little better. And when some managed to return, they usually came back different. They arrived in new clothes, with wrapped gifts, watches, fabrics, sweets for the children, and stories that seemed too large for the little railway station. The children ran to embrace them. The mothers wept. The neighbors appeared to hear the news. But there was one thing almost no one noticed. That man who returned carried two lands inside him. The land where he had been born. And the land where he had learned to survive. Perhaps that is the greatest inheritance of Italian emigration: not only houses, surnames, churches, recipes, festivals, songs, or words preserved through the generations. The true inheritance lies in that capacity to carry two worlds in the same heart. The Italian immigrant left to find a future. And in the end he left his children and grandchildren a story. A story that often begins with an old photograph, a yellowed document, a surname written a little differently, a hard-to-read certificate, or a small Italian town that someone in the family can still point to on the map. Maybe you have that story in your own house. Maybe your great-grandfather boarded a ship without knowing exactly what he would find on the other side of the ocean. Maybe your nonna crossed the Atlantic carrying a small suitcase and a homesickness that never completely disappeared. Maybe somewhere in your family there is a forgotten letter, a photograph, a passport, a certificate, or simply a story told so many times that no one knows anymore where memory ends and legend begins. Do not let that story disappear. If you are a descendant of Italians, tell us the story of your ancestors. Where did they leave from? What was the surname? In what year did they arrive? Did they come to the United States, Brazil, Argentina, or somewhere else? In what town or colony did they begin their new life? Write in the comments. Share your family’s story. Because every Italian family carries a small piece of the great history of Italian emigration. And perhaps your memory is exactly the story someone, on the other side of the world, has been looking for.
Author’s Note
The need to emigrate did not begin with the Italians who crossed the Atlantic at the end of the nineteenth century. It came from much earlier, but it was in the last twenty-five years of that century that it reached an extraordinary scale. Millions of Italians left their villages, towns, and fields in search of work, land, and better conditions of life. Among them were many peasants from the Veneto, Lombardy, Friuli, Piedmont, and other regions who found in the Americas a destination for their dreams and hopes. The great emigration of the late nineteenth century did not end the story. In the early decades of the twentieth century new waves continued to carry Italians to different parts of the world. They were smaller flows, shaped by different circumstances, but they kept alive the old necessity of leaving. Wars, economic hardship, lack of opportunity, and the social transformations of Italy continued to push men and women far from their native soil. Each new wave brought with it a suitcase, a surname, a language, a tradition, and a memory. Some left for good; others nourished for years the dream of return. Many never went back, but their children and grandchildren remained tied to that Italy they knew only through the stories of parents and grandparents. That is why Italian emigration cannot be understood merely as a succession of departures and arrivals. It was a human experience that crossed generations. It began long before the great ships that crossed the Atlantic and continued long after the ports stopped receiving those enormous contingents of emigrants. In the Americas that history remains alive. It lives in the surnames, the old photographs, the churches, the festivals, the recipes, the dialect words preserved inside the home, and above all in the memory of Italian families. Every descendant who sets out to learn where his grandfather or her nonna came from is, in a way, taking up again the journey that began more than a century ago. This chronicle is therefore a small tribute to all those who one day had to leave. To those who left Italy carrying little in their baggage but carrying inside themselves the hope of building a better life. And also to their descendants, who today have the chance to recover that story and keep it from being lost in the silence of time.
Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta
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