The Accounts of Destiny A Story of Emigration Drawn from the Statistics of the Kingdom of Italy
Arezzo, Tuscany — Winter of 1883
It was a time when numbers began to tell stories. The newly unified Kingdom of Italy was trying to understand its own people, and the recently established General Directorate of Statistics had started recording not only who was born, but who was leaving—and why.
Tommaso Bartolomei had never cared about statistics. Since the age of twelve he had worked the rye fields of a ruined barony, tending land that no longer yielded enough to keep the landowner’s children in school. At thirty-two, with lungs worn thin by harvest dust and hands twisted by hard labor, Tommaso was just one more entry in the official registers: peasant, married, illiterate, landless, father of two. And now, a candidate for emigration.
He was not the first from his village. The movement had already grown visible. Letters bearing stamps from Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo arrived at the churches carrying promissory notes and advice. Young men left alone, following the trails of brothers, uncles, or godfathers. Mayors of the communes wrote dry reports describing the “exodus of hands” with growing unease. Rural landowners pressed the Ministry of the Interior to restrict the issuing of passports—they feared a shortage of labor, rising wages, and the collapse of a system built on the resignation of the poor.
But the poor kept their own accounts. They knew that four coins sent from Brazil were worth more than three months of sweat on the exhausted soil of Tuscany. They knew that one son in Campinas could support five in Arezzo. And Tommaso knew, with the certainty of a man who had already lost too much, that staying was only a slower way to die.
Genoa and Naples, Ports of Embarkation — May 1884
The ships left packed. Every name entered in the ship’s log marked an absence in the local statistics and a presence on the radar of a new country. The bureaucracy was relentless: a passport application to the mayor, a fee, military clearance, and finally the exit visa.
Tommaso traveled on his own papers, without agents. The passage had been paid by a brother-in-law who worked as a stevedore on the docks of Santos. Unlike most, he left with a fixed destination: he would be a hired hand on a coffee plantation in the province of São Paulo. At customs he underwent a medical inspection, had his belongings searched, and saw his name copied into a ledger that would later be sent to the newly created General Commissariat of Emigration, charged with organizing the data of the Italian diaspora.
In the third-class hold, among feverish children and women in mourning, he listened to the stories of other numbers: a tinsmith from Calabria, a bricklayer from Umbria, a widower from Basilicata. Dozens of different origins, one common fate—to stop counting only for the statistics and start counting for the world.
Fazenda Boa Vista, Province of São Paulo — 1885
Brazil did not appear on the official emigration maps with the same prominence as the United States or Argentina. Yet its promises of land, climate, and abundance had drawn many. The promotional pamphlets painted the forests in exaggerated greens, hid the debts forced on the colonists, and ignored the tropical fevers that swept through the barracks.
At Fazenda Boa Vista, Tommaso quickly grasped the system: sharecropping, an expensive company store, no cash wages, and the overseer’s absolute control over the harvest. The soil was rich; the arrangement was not. Still, he stayed. He endured. He was skilled with a hoe, careful with accounts, and stubborn about saving. Within two years he was sending money to his wife, still in Tuscany. In five he brought his children over. In seven he bought a small plot of thin woodland along the banks of the Jaguari River.
Sumaré, 1909 — Twenty-Five Years Later
Years afterward, Tommaso Bartolomei’s name appeared only once in a report from the Ministry of Statistics. It sat in a secondary appendix: “peasant, emigrated to Brazil, accompanied by wife and children, destination: São Paulo, port of embarkation: Genoa.”
Most of those who left in that decade eventually returned. Tommaso stayed. He became the owner of a small farm, grew corn, raised pigs, and taught evening arithmetic classes to the children of other colonists. He still kept his passport as a relic, together with the deed to the land and the letters exchanged with his home commune.
He was one among the twenty-six million Italians who, between 1876 and 1960, left their country. One among millions classified by age, sex, occupation, and port. But, as he himself would write on a scrap of paper tucked among his farming notes:
“Statistics do not feel hunger, do not shiver in the ship’s hold, do not bury children in the hot Brazilian bush. Only the living tell that part of the story.”
Author’s Note
This narrative was born from the desire to give flesh and voice to the names that, for so long, were reduced to numbers. In the cold archives of the General Directorate of Statistics, peasants like Tommaso Bartolomei appear only as lines in tables: age, occupation, illiteracy, destination. Yet behind every datum stood a tired body, a hard choice, a stubborn hope—and a story that deserved to be told.
The Accounts of Destiny is an attempt to stitch life back into the record, to bring literature closer to demography. In following Tommaso’s path I tried to stay guided by real historical sources—ministerial reports, migration bulletins, port regulations, and official propaganda of the time. Above all, I let myself be led by the silence of those who left without leaving a written memory—those who, like him, survived more as legacy than as a street name.
This is not an attempt to romanticize suffering or to turn the immigrant into a hero. It is simply a recognition that between statistics and destinies there are always lives that matter. And that the stories of the anonymous, like Tommaso’s, can teach us more about the past—and about ourselves—than any line graph.
To the descendants of those living numbers, this work is dedicated. May they find in it a mirror, an origin, or simply a breath of belonging. Because what is not told is lost. And what is turned into story endures.
Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta
