From the Apennines to Spoon River. Stories of Migration From the Mountains of Bologna and Modena to America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This is a book of history, the history of a country that in the aftermath of its Unification found itself backward and deprived, poor and unequal, and that for a good part did not find any other way to emancipation than to emigrate in search of a better fate. This is a book of stories, hundreds, thousands of stories which together make the story of the exodus which was the Great Italian Emigration. On the tracks of Vittorio Ardeni who set off as a young lad to seek his fortune, following a group of people from Gaggio Montano on the Bologna Apennines who went to Le Havre and set sail for America to work in the coal mines of Illinois, the search widens to include the swarms of men, women and children who from that group of villages in the Bologna and Modena Apennines over twenty-five years between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went to populate the American Midwest between the Indian Territories and the prairies of Illinois, in those valleys around Spoon River where during those very same years Edgar Lee Masters wrote his Anthology. They labored, toiled, sometimes lost their lives, more often found a new life, contributing to feed America’s melting pot. Many of them stayed, immigrants in a foreign land, many others went back to their homeland, all of them up against the growing ruthless capitalism of the gilded age. This is a book of names and family names, where one can find the stories of grandparents and ancestors, five thousand stories of the people of Gaggio, Fanano, Montese, Lizzano and Sestola, of the mountain people from the Apennines who made the history of stray and floundering Italy, that same Italy which thanks to that exodus was able to take the leap towards modernity.