The Italian Immigrants Who Came Home: Why Some Returned to Italy

“Not all courage lies in leaving. Sometimes, after crossing an ocean and discovering another world, courage lies in coming home.”

Not everyone stayed. The story of Italian immigration to America is often told as a one-way journey—a final departure from the old country toward the promise of a better life in the New World. We know the familiar version: a man arrives with little, works through hardship, saves what he can, and eventually builds a home, a business, or a future for his children. It is a powerful story, and an important one. But it is not the whole story. Some Italians went back. And there were many of them. During the great era of Italian migration, especially from the late nineteenth century through the years before World War I, thousands of immigrants crossed the Atlantic more than once. Many were temporary migrants who came to the United States intending to work for a few years, save money, and return home. Others stayed longer before deciding that America was not the place where they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. Historical sources describe a remarkably large return movement; for some groups of Italian immigrants, as many as 30 to 50 percent returned to Italy within five years. They were known in Italy as ritornati—those who had come back. They came from many parts of Italy, including the southern provinces and Sicily, but also from other regions of the peninsula. They arrived in New York and moved wherever work could be found: into the tenements of Manhattan, the coal towns of Pennsylvania, the factories and neighborhoods of Chicago, the docks of San Francisco, the mines of the Appalachian region, and the farms and orchards of the American countryside. Italian immigrants worked in mines, quarries, factories, docks, farms, and construction. For some, America proved harder than they had imagined. The tenement room could be dark and crowded. The mine could be dangerous. Factory work could be exhausting. Wages could be low, rents high, and employment uncertain. Some immigrants encountered exploitation by labor brokers or padroni. Others struggled with illness, loneliness, discrimination, or the simple exhaustion of living in a place where almost everything—the language, the customs, the streets, even the rhythm of the day—was unfamiliar. Not everyone could endure it. But going home was not as simple as buying another ticket. Returning meant confronting the money already spent, the hopes invested in the journey, and the expectations of parents, wives, brothers, and children who had watched someone leave for America. It meant walking again through the streets of a village that had existed in memory for years but might no longer look quite the same. And it meant being seen. In many Italian communities, family reputation and the judgment of neighbors carried considerable weight. A man returning from America brought home more than a suitcase. He brought a story. And people wanted to know what that story meant. Some returned quietly. They avoided explanations, settled back into familiar routines, and tried to make their absence seem like something that had happened to someone else. For others, the return was difficult. Leaving had required courage. Staying required endurance. Returning could be interpreted as surrender. But that was only one possible interpretation. Not every immigrant who came home had failed. Some returned with money carefully saved during years of hard work. It might not have been a fortune by American standards, but in an Italian village it could be enough to buy land, repair a house, open a small shop, marry, or provide a family with greater security. For them, America had not been a failure. It had been a difficult investment. They had gone across the ocean, worked, saved, learned, and returned before the years had taken everything from them. They came home carrying not only money, but knowledge of another world. Some were admired. Some were envied. Some were both. And then there were those who returned for a reason that had little to do with money. They simply discovered that they wanted to live where they had begun. Perhaps America had given them work but not belonging. Perhaps they missed the language they had spoken as children, the landscape they remembered, the food of home, the church bells, the family gatherings, or the ordinary familiarity of people who knew their name. Distance can sometimes clarify what proximity makes difficult to understand. After years away, some immigrants discovered that home was not merely the place they had left. It was part of who they were. The return, however, did not erase the American experience. A man who had crossed the Atlantic was no longer exactly the man who had stood on the Italian shore before departure. He had seen different cities, worked beside people from other countries, learned new habits, heard new languages, and measured life by a different set of expectations. Even after returning to Italy, he might feel slightly out of place. He had become, in a quiet way, a man between worlds. This was one of the paradoxes of Italian migration. The immigrant could leave Italy without becoming entirely American, and return to Italy without becoming exactly the person he had been before. The journey changed him in either direction. That is why the history of Italian immigration cannot be told only through the stories of those who stayed. It must also include those who went back. The ritornati were not simply failures in the American story. Nor were they all heroes of financial success. They were people making decisions within the limits of their circumstances—sometimes driven by necessity, sometimes by economics, sometimes by family, and sometimes by the realization that the life they wanted was somewhere else. Some crossed the Atlantic once. Others crossed it several times. Some planted roots in America. Others returned to the soil where their own roots had begun. All of them experienced the uncertainty of leaving one world and entering another. For the descendants of Italian immigrants in America, these stories matter because family history is rarely as simple as the official version suggests. At the Sunday table, the family may remember the grandfather who stayed, bought a house, raised children, and became American. But perhaps there was also a brother who returned. Perhaps there was an uncle who came back from Pennsylvania with a small savings account. Perhaps a great-grandfather crossed the ocean twice before finally deciding where he belonged. Perhaps his name survived in a letter, a photograph, a passport, or a story repeated by someone who remembered him. Those lives deserve to be remembered too. Because immigration was never only a story of departure. It was a story of movement, uncertainty, courage, disappointment, adaptation, and choice. Some people found their future in America. Some found it again in Italy. And some spent their lives moving between the two. Not all courage lies in leaving. Sometimes it lies in admitting that the road has taken you somewhere you do not wish to remain. Sometimes it lies in beginning again. And sometimes, after crossing an ocean and discovering another world, courage lies in coming home.

Author’s Note
American immigration stories naturally tend to celebrate permanence. We remember the immigrant who arrived, endured hardship, built a home, raised children, and became part of the American story. For Italian Americans, that narrative is deeply meaningful—and rightly so. But there was another side to the great Italian migration. Many immigrants did not intend to remain in the United States permanently. Some came for a few years, worked, saved money, and returned to Italy. Others stayed longer before deciding to go home. Some crossed the Atlantic more than once. Historians have described this temporary and circular pattern through the expression “birds of passage,” while Italian sources referred to those who returned as ritornati. The Library of Congress notes that, for this generation of Italian immigrants, between 30 and 50 percent returned to Italy within five years. The phenomenon was part of a much larger movement. Between 1876 and 1915, roughly fourteen million Italians emigrated abroad, with the United States receiving the largest share of those who left for the Americas. Their reasons for returning varied. Some were disappointed by the conditions they encountered in America. Others had accomplished precisely what they had intended: they had worked, saved, and accumulated enough money to improve their lives back home. Still others discovered that family, language, culture, and belonging mattered more to them than the promise of permanent settlement abroad. For the families who received them, however, a return could carry complicated meanings. A man who came home without money might be regarded as someone who had failed. A man who returned with savings could be admired. Another might return simply because he had decided that his future belonged in the village where his life had begun. The same journey could therefore represent defeat to one observer and wisdom to another. That complexity is essential to understanding Italian immigration. The immigrant experience was never a straight line from poverty to prosperity, from Italy to America, or from departure to permanent settlement. It was a collection of individual lives, each shaped by circumstance, ambition, family, work, luck, and choice. For descendants of Italian immigrants in the United States, the stories of those who returned add another dimension to the family inheritance. They remind us that not every dream ended in America. Some dreams crossed the ocean and then crossed it again. And perhaps that is one of the most human truths of immigration: sometimes the courage to leave is only the beginning. The courage to return can be just as great. In the end, the history of Italian immigration belongs not only to those who stayed. It also belongs to those who came home.

Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta