Italian Americans

The Early Years

The presence of Italians in what would become the United States begins with explorers and adventurers who journeyed here almost 5 centuries before Italy itself united and became a modern nation. Included among them were such important early explorers as Cristoforo Colombo (Columbus), Giovanni Cabotto (John Cabot), Amerigo Vespucci, and Giovanni de Verrazano, all of whom explored and charted the new land. Enrico de Tonti, together with French explorer Robert La Salle, was the first European to explore the Mississippi River in 1682. The two of them canoed from the Illinois River to the Mississippi Delta, negotiating peace treaties with many local tribes that allowed French settlement throughout the vast Mississippi Valley, later acquired by the United States through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Long before the English colonies came into existence, missionaries such as Father Marcos da Nizza explored Arizona in 1539. Father Eusebio Chino, who arrived in 1681, spent almost 30 years in the U.S. Southwest, exploring and mapping while founding settlements in the region and helping to develop its cattle industry.

In the early years of the thirteen English colonies, Italian artisans were often invited to bring their needed skills to the fledgling new settlements. As early as 1621, they were in Jamestown, manufacturing glass beads for British authorities to use as currency to trade with the Indigenous Peoples. In Georgia colony, Italians brought their raw silk production expertise to build a silk industry. Along with many other nationalities, Italians migrated to Maryland colony, which welcomed Catholics in a religiously intolerant age, and there they obtained land to begin their lives anew.

Much has been written about Filippo Mazzei—a physician originally from Tuscany with a strong interest in agricultural science—who influenced the writings and farming of his neighbor, Thomas Jefferson. Mazzei's own writings, which Jefferson helped translate and publish, spoke of all men being equal, an idea and phrase that Jefferson used in the Declaration of Independence. In the Revolutionary War, fifty Italians—including two officers—joined the ranks of the Continental Army, and two regiments of volunteers were recruited in Italy to come fight for the cause of U.S. independence.

The 19th Century

Most of the 14,000 Italians who came to the United States between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War were skilled artisans, artists, educators, musicians, or political refugees, rather than the mostly unskilled peasants who would come later. A prime example is Constantino Brumidi, both an artist and political refugee, who arrived in 1852 and spent the next 25 years decorating the Capitol building. Painting monumental frescoes in its rotunda, he became known as the “Michelangelo of the U.S. Capitol Building.” Another example is an 1850 arrival from Florence, Antonio Meucci, who invented the first primitive version of the telephone 26 years before Alexander Graham Bell.

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