The Italian diaspora
From 1870, after the unification of the Kingdom of Italy, the country industrialized, but struggled to catch up with its European neighbours. The majority of Italy's population is rural and, among them, 70% of citizens are farmers. Many of them live in poverty, cultivate a plot of land that is not sufficient to meet household needs or are employed by large landowners for a pittance. A massive emigration movement is underway, with Italians moving to the industrialized regions of northern Europe and then to the New World in order to improve their lot: this is the so-called Italian diaspora. This is an essentially economic phenomenon, which will experience two waves of migration: first between 1880 and 1914, and then in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the Po plain, a vast and fertile area, the agricultural landscape is dominated by large land holdings cultivated by several categories of workers: alongside the salaried workers there is a seasonal and occasional workforce, recruited from among the peasants of the Apennine valleys, whose situation is very precarious. It is this section of the population that will be added to the ranks of Italian migrants, although the figures for Emilia-Romagna remain fairly limited: 138,000 individuals out of a total of five million Italians. The preferred destinations for migrants from Emilia-Romagna are Europe, especially Switzerland and France, and Argentina, which currently has several Emilia-Romagna associations that maintain links with the country of origin. Several protagonists of this emigration represent examples of successful integration: this is the case of Guido Jacobacci, a Modenese engineer who emigrated to Argentina in 1889 and was responsible for the construction of the railway in Patagonia. Another example is Anacleto Angelini, an entrepreneur from Ferrara who arrived in Chile in 1948 and was named by Forbes magazine as one of the richest men in the world in the 2000s, or Luigi Papaiz, a Bolognese who founded the most important locksmithing company in Brazil. Alongside this Italian emigration abroad, there has also been internal emigration which, at a national level, has mainly involved a movement from the Mezzogiorno to the industrialized cities of northwestern Italy, to Turin and Milan.
Peasants at the service of the fascist regime
In Emilia-Romagna, an internal migration took place during the inter-war period under the fascist regime. Mussolini began a vast agricultural reclamation project: large portions of uncultivated land were reclaimed, drained, irrigated and cultivated in order to make Italy self-sufficient in terms of agricultural needs. The most extensive reclamation project concerns the Pontine Marshes area south of Rome, a vast marshy and unhealthy area infested with mosquitoes and ravaged by malaria. This huge project is labour-intensive and the scheme is inviting bids from farmers in the north-eastern part of the country. Tens of thousands of inhabitants of Emilia-Romagna, attracted by the promise of a small house and a piece of land, will thus take the road to the Pontine marshes where more than 20,000 hectares will be drained and improved between 1928 and 1932. In 2010, the author Antonio Pennacchi published a book on the subject: in a tragi-comic tone, Canal Mussolini tells the story of a peasant family from the Forlì region who emigrated to these inhospitable marshes to serve this pharaonic reclamation project.
From emigration to immigration
From the 1950s onwards, Italy experienced an economic boom and the Italian diaspora gradually dried up. The younger generation was mainly displaced from the countryside to the cities, while the industrial cities in the north-west of the country continued to attract workers from the Mezzogiorno. Since 1975, the trend has been reversed: Italy has gradually been transformed into a land of immigrants. In Emilia-Romagna, foreign minorities mainly come from Eastern Europe (Romania, Albania, Ukraine, Moldova), the Maghreb (Morocco and Tunisia) and Asia (China, Pakistan, India, Philippines). Foreign citizens account for almost 12% of the total population of the region and a slight majority are women. It is the third Italian region with the highest number of foreign residents, after Lombardy and Lazio. It must be said that its favourable economic situation and low unemployment rate make it an attractive destination! Moreover, since 1995 and the resumption of internal migration, Emilia-Romagna has been one of the privileged stages for Italians leaving the south of the country, along with Lombardy, Veneto and Tuscany.
National language and regional dialects
In Emilia-Romagna, unless we address you in English because we have detected that you are not from the country, we will speak to you in Italian, the national language.
Italian, a Latin language with melodious and singing sounds, was formed late: it appeared as a literary idiom in the 12th century. The Italian aristocracy and writers preferred Latin, Provençal and French for centuries. Little by little, a language was formed and formalized, thanks to the work of authors such as Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. They used the Tuscan dialect, which is the origin of Italian as we know it today.
At the time of Italian unification, however, the young country still presents itself as a mosaic made up of several hundred dialects: each region defends its own, if not each locality! Linguistic unification was gradual and made possible by military service, uniformity of education and the media, first radio, then television. At present, dialects are gradually losing their importance, but remain an essential cultural and historical reference point for understanding Italy. Some of them are recognised as languages in their own right, such as Neapolitan and Sicilian.
The two dialects spoken inEmilia-Romagna, Emiliano and Romagnolo, belong to the group of Romance languages of Northern Italy, and more precisely to the group of Gallo-Italian languages, which originated from Vulgar Latin and were influenced by the Celtic language. The distinction between the two idioms was made during the High Middle Ages, when Romagna was in the hands of the Greek-speaking Byzantines, while Emilia belonged to the Lombard kingdom, a Germanic people. Although the two dialects are still quite close today, they present a series of territorial variants: for example,Emiliano Bolognese (itself branched in Bolognese from the city, the plain and the Apennines) is distinguished from Modenese and Parmigiano; Romagnolo from Ravenna, Rimini and San Marino.
