Why Your Italian Ancestors Left Italy: The Story of the Great Emigration

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Your nonna always said it. Your grandfather rarely talked about it. But somewhere in your family’s past, an Italian ancestor made a brave decision. They left everything they knew — their village, their church, their family — and sailed to a new world. Between 1880 and 1924, more than four million Italians emigrated to the United States. They came from tiny villages with no running water. They crossed the Atlantic in the lower decks of steamships. They arrived at Ellis Island with almost nothing. This is the story of why they left — and why it still matters to you today.

Italy Was a Country Divided

When your ancestors left, Italy was less than 30 years old as a unified country. It was officially founded in 1861. But unification did not bring equality. It brought something closer to occupation for the south.

The new Italian government was run largely by northerners. It taxed the south heavily. The money built railways and factories — but mostly in the north. Southern Italians paid the price and got little in return.

The south had a name: the Mezzogiorno. It means “midday” — the land closest to the sun. But life there was hard and often desperate. It was the starting point for one of the largest mass migrations in human history.

Feudal Landlords and Empty Plates

The Mezzogiorno was controlled by large landowners called latifondisti. They owned vast estates. Peasant farmers — called contadini — worked the land for almost nothing.

A farm worker in Sicily earned about 16 to 40 cents a day in 1900. In America, even the worst factory job paid $1.50 to $2.00 a day. That difference changed everything. For a family with no savings and no future in Italy, it was impossible to ignore.

Families had many children but little land. When a father died, there was almost nothing to pass on. The eldest son might inherit a small plot. Younger sons had to leave or starve. This pattern repeated in village after village across the south.

In Basilicata, the situation was so severe that the writer Carlo Levi was exiled there in the 1930s. He described peasants in the village of Aliano who had no faith in the government or the church. They only trusted la famiglia — the family. His memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, gave the world a rare picture of the deep south your ancestors came from.

Natural disasters made everything worse. A vine disease called phylloxera destroyed vineyards across the south in the 1880s and 1890s. The 1908 earthquake in Messina and Reggio Calabria killed between 75,000 and 200,000 people. It was one of the worst disasters in European history. Many survivors left immediately after. They had lost everything. There was nothing left to stay for.

Which Regions Did Italian Emigrants Come From?

About 80 per cent of Italian emigrants to the United States came from the south. The main regions were:

• Sicily — the largest single source of Italian-Americans. Especially the western provinces of Palermo, Agrigento, and Trapani. See our guide to Italian surnames from Sicily.
• Campania — centred on Naples. Many emigrants came from the provinces of Avellino, Salerno, and Benevento.
• Calabria — the “toe” of Italy’s boot. One of the poorest regions in Europe at the time. See our guide to Italian surnames from Calabria.
• Abruzzo and Molise — mountainous interior regions where sheep-farming barely kept families alive.
• Basilicata — also known as Lucania. One of the most isolated regions of Italy, with some of the highest emigration rates in the country.
• Puglia — the “heel” of Italy. Large estates, low wages, and a long tradition of emigration.

If your family name suggests southern Italian roots — think Russo, Esposito, Romano, De Luca, Ferrara, Rizzo, or Caruso — you likely have ancestry in one of these regions. Many northern Italians also emigrated, particularly from Veneto and Friuli, but they often went to South America rather than the United States.

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Campanilismo: Loyalty to the Bell Tower

There is an Italian word that explains a great deal about how emigrants moved — and where they settled.

Campanilismo means loyalty to the bell tower — the church tower of one’s home village. The bell marked the rhythm of daily life: births, deaths, Sunday Mass, feast days, harvests. It was the sound of home.

When Italians emigrated, they did not go alone. They followed people from the same village. One man from Sciacca, Sicily would find other Sciacca men in New York. He would rent a room near them. He would work alongside them. Then he would write home and encourage his brother to come next.

This is called chain migration. It is why Italian-American communities are often rooted in one specific village. Ask many Italian-Americans where their family is from, and they will tell you not just “Italy” or even “Sicily”, but a precise place: “My grandfather was from Corleone” or “My grandmother came from Altamura.”

That kind of precision is a gift. It means you may be able to trace your family records all the way back to that specific comune.

The Journey to America

The main port of departure was Naples. Emigrants would travel there by foot, by cart, or by train — sometimes a journey of several days. They carried everything they owned in a single cloth bag or a small wooden chest.

The crossing took two to four weeks. Emigrants travelled in steerage — the lowest decks of the ship. They shared cramped sleeping quarters with hundreds of other people. There was little light, little air, and often very little food. Illness spread quickly in those conditions.

A steerage ticket cost about 25 lire — roughly a month’s wages for a farm labourer. Some families spent years saving for a single ticket. Some borrowed money from neighbours. The debt they carried with them to America was their first burden on the new continent.

At the end of the crossing was Ellis Island. Between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island processed about 12 million immigrants. Around four million of them were Italian. They were examined by doctors and questioned by officials. They were asked their name, their home village, where they were going, and whether they had any money.

Some names were recorded incorrectly. Officials misspelled surnames or wrote down an anglicised version. It is worth searching for both the original Italian spelling and any English variants when you research records. You can search surviving Ellis Island ship manifests for free online. Many records list not just the immigrant’s name but their exact home village in Italy — a direct clue for your family research.

Where Italian Immigrants Settled in America

Italians settled mainly in cities on the East Coast and in industrial centres across the country. Because of campanilismo, immigrants from the same village often ended up on the same street.

• New York City — the largest Italian-American population. The Lower East Side of Manhattan became known as Little Italy. By 1910, more than 340,000 Italians lived in New York.
• Chicago — Taylor Street was the main Italian neighbourhood. Sicilians and Neapolitans settled here in large numbers.
• Philadelphia — South Philadelphia remains strongly Italian-American to this day.
• Boston — The North End is still called Boston’s Little Italy. Waves of southern Italian immigrants settled there from the 1880s onwards.
• San Francisco — North Beach. Many came from Genoa and Liguria to work in fishing and agriculture.
• New Orleans — One of the earliest Italian-American communities, with a strong Sicilian presence.

If you know which city your family settled in, that can help narrow down which region of Italy they came from. Families from Palermo tended to settle in specific blocks of East Harlem. Families from Avellino in Campania clustered in parts of Brooklyn. The pattern of settlement followed the pattern of the village they left.

What Your Ancestors Brought With Them

Italian immigrants arrived with almost nothing in material terms. But what they carried in their hearts and habits shaped America in lasting ways.

They brought their Catholic faith. Italian national parishes sprang up across America, with priests who spoke Italian and led festivals for Italian patron saints. The Feast of San Gennaro — brought from Naples — has been held every September in New York’s Little Italy since 1926. Families from small Sicilian villages celebrated the feast of their local patron saint, recreating in Brooklyn or Chicago what they had known in Palermo or Catania.

They brought their food. Sunday dinner was — and still is — a sacred ritual in many Italian-American families. The pot of Sunday gravy that started simmering before Mass. The handmade pasta stretched out on a floured board by a grandmother who had learned it from her mother in Calabria. Fresh bread baked on Saturday mornings. These were not just recipes. They were acts of memory, repeated each week so that something of the old country would survive.

They brought the concept of la famiglia — family above everything else. The extended family was the safety net. When someone needed work, a cousin found them a job. When someone arrived sick from the crossing, a neighbour from the same village took them in. No one ate alone if they could help it. No one faced trouble without kin around them.

These traditions survived. If your family still gathers for Sunday dinner, if the names Giuseppe, Carmela, Lucia, and Salvatore still appear in your family tree, if someone still makes a recipe “the way Nonna used to make it” — then the culture your ancestors carried across the ocean is still alive in you.

The End of the Great Emigration

The great wave of Italian emigration came to an abrupt end in 1924. The United States Congress passed the Immigration Act that year, setting strict national quotas. The quota for Italy was set at just 3,845 people per year.

In 1907, more than 285,000 Italians had arrived in America in a single year. In 1924, the gates closed. Almost overnight, the flow of immigrants stopped.

Those already in America stayed. They had built lives there. They had started businesses. Their children were born American citizens. The connection to Italy grew thinner with each generation — but it never fully disappeared. It survived in the food, in the names, in the stories told around the Sunday dinner table.

If your family arrived in America between 1880 and 1924, your ancestors were part of one of the greatest human migrations in history. Roughly one in five Americans with Italian heritage can trace their roots to a specific village in southern Italy. That village almost certainly still exists. Its records may still be intact.

Finding Your Family’s Story Today

The records your ancestors left behind are still accessible. Italy has kept detailed civil registers since 1866. Before that, Catholic parish records go back centuries. Many are now digitised and freely available online.

The Antenati portal — run by the Italian National Archive — gives free access to civil birth, marriage, and death records from across Italy. Many records go back to the 1820s. You do not need to speak Italian to search them.

Ship manifests from Ellis Island often list the immigrant’s exact home village in Italy. That one detail can unlock generations of records. It is the key that opens the archive.

Once you have a village name, you can search the registers of that comune. You can find out when your great-great-grandparents were born and who their parents were. You may be able to go back five or six generations to the early 1800s.

For a full guide to starting this search, see our article on how to trace your Italian ancestry. For DNA testing to confirm your Italian roots, our Italian ancestry DNA guide explains which tests work best. To plan a visit to your ancestral village, our guide to planning an Italian-American homecoming covers the whole process. And if you want to explore Italian citizenship, our complete guide to Italian dual citizenship through ancestry explains your rights under jure sanguinis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did so many Italians leave Italy between 1880 and 1924?

Most Italians left because of extreme poverty in the south of the country. Large landowners controlled the farmland. Day labourers earned almost nothing — sometimes less than 40 cents per day. Natural disasters, disease, and a lack of opportunity pushed millions to emigrate. Wages in America were five to ten times higher than anything available at home.

Which parts of Italy did most emigrants come from?

About 80 per cent came from the south — the Mezzogiorno. The main regions were Sicily, Campania, Calabria, Abruzzo, Basilicata, and Puglia. These areas had the deepest poverty and the highest emigration rates. Northern Italians also emigrated but often went to South America.

How did Italian immigrants travel to America?

Most left from the port of Naples. They sailed in steerage — the cheapest section of the ship — for two to four weeks. They arrived at Ellis Island in New York, where they were examined and processed before being allowed to enter the country. The journey was long, uncomfortable, and often dangerous.

Can I still visit my ancestors’ village in Italy?

Yes. Most Italian villages still exist. Many have well-preserved civil and parish records in their town halls and churches. Some have programmes to welcome Italian-American visitors. Our guide to planning an Italian heritage trip explains how to find your family’s comune and what to expect when you visit.

What Italian surnames are common among Italian-Americans with southern roots?

Common southern Italian surnames include Russo, Esposito, Romano, De Luca, Ferrari, Rizzo, Caruso, Conti, and Marino. Names ending in a vowel and those with prefixes like De, Di, La, or Lo are often southern Italian in origin. Our series on Italian surnames from Sicily and Italian surnames from Calabria explores the origins of the most common family names from these regions.

You Might Also Enjoy

• How to Trace Your Italian Ancestry – Step-by-Step Guide for Americans
• The Italian-American Homecoming: Planning Your First Trip Back to Italy
• Italian Ancestry DNA Testing: Which DNA Test is Best for Italian Roots?

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