Between 1880 and 1920 4 million Italians entered America during the period of large-scale emigration from Italy and the United States.
Before the 1880s Italians had been arriving in America in small numbers as far back as the seventeenth century. Italians began to arrive in 1610 with several craftsmen immigrating to Virginia. In the years preceding the Civil War, Italian immigrants arrived chiefly from the northern and economically more advanced areas of Genoa, Tuscany, Venetia, Lombardy, and Piedmont. Many were farmers from rich Piedmont and Liguria and were attracted to California, where they developed rich citrusand wine enterprises. In 1880, however, this began to change. Of the nearly four million Italians who entered America between 1880 and 1920, the vast majority emigrated from the poor agricultural regions of the South, the provinces of Abruzzo, Campania, Apulia, Basilicata (Lucania), Calabria, and the island of Sicily.
From 1820-1940, a total of 4,719,223 Italians immigrated to the United States, 12.32% of the total immigration during that period of time.
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