ABSTRACT
There was “talk of America constantly in the trains, on the road, in the towns,” the ex-patriate Antonio Mangano reported in 1902 on his investigatory travels through Southern Italy to ascertain the effect of immigration on the region. The most authoritative report of steamship condi-tions during the peak period of Italian emigration came from special agents posing as immigrants for the Dillingham Commission, authorized by the US Congress to investigate all aspects of US immigration. Taken as a whole, the flow of remittances, the continuous coming and going of Birds of Passage, and the permanent return of the relatively affluent Ameri-cani to their Italian paesi, wrought a not easily quantifiable change upon South-ern Italy. For the earliest Italian emigrants, it did not actually matter that much whether the ship on which they embarked landed in New York or Sao Paulo. The cultural gulf between the two, however, could not be bridged completely even in America.
