ABSTRACT
For more than a century, and since the country’s unification in 1861, Italians have migrated abroad trying to escape poverty and deprivation at home. Migration, therefore, has been an enduring feature in Italian economic life. As in many other aspects of her history, even for migration, however, Italy is somewhat of a latecomer on the international arena. Indeed, until the end of the century, Italian emigration was only for a relatively small share of the country’s population and did not provide a substantial contribution to the massive population movements which pervade the New and the Old World. The picture changes quite dramatically at the beginning of the twentieth century. From 1901 until 1913, 8.1 million people emigrated from Italy. On average each year 1.9 percent of the Italian population moved abroad in search of better living conditions. They went both to the Americas and to the rest of Europe and they represented a sizeable part of worldwide migrations.
