Italian Argentine - History

History

Small groups of Italians started to immigrate to Argentina as early as the second half of the 17th century. However, the stream of Italian immigration to Argentina became a mass phenomenon only in the years 1880-1920 during the Great European immigration wave to Argentina, peaking between 1900 and 1914, when 50% of the total 2 million Italians immigrating during said period arrived in the country. In 1914, the city of Buenos Aires alone had more than 300,000 Italian-born inhabitants, representing 25% of the total population. In the decades pre-1900, Italian immigrants initially arrived mainly from the northern regions of Piedmont, Veneto and Lombardy; after the turn of the century however, with the rapid industrialization of the North, immigration patterns shifted to rural and overpopulated Southern Italy, especially Campania, Calabria and Sicily. The Italian immigrants were primarily male, between 14-50 and more than 50% literate; in terms of occupations, 78.7% in the active population were agricultural workers or unskilled laborers, 10.7% artisans, while only 3.7% worked in commerce or as professionals. The outbreak of World War I and the rise of Fascism in Italy caused a rapid fall in immigration to Argentina, with a slight revival in 1923-27, but eventually stopped during the Great Depression and the Second World War. After the end of World War II, Italy was reduced to rubble and occupied by foreign armies. The period 1946-1957 brought another massive wave of 380,000 Italians to Argentina. The substantial recovery allowed by the Italian economic miracle of the 1950-60s eventually caused the era of Italian diaspora abroad to finish, and in the following decades Italy became a migration receiving country. Today, there are still 527,570 Italian citizens living in the Argentine Republic.