Immigranti italiani nella Moldavia romena tra la fine dell'Ottocento e l'inizio del Novecento (1876-1916)

Italian immigrants in Romanian Moldavia at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century (1876-1916) Although Italians have always migrated, the phenomenon of mass migration from the end of the nineteenth century, which lasted about a century, known as the great Italian migration, is undoubtedly a remarkable episode in world's contemporary history, as it represents one of the biggest exoduses of a population in recent history. The agrarian crisis, the low capacity of the Italian space to adapt to the innovations brought by the eighteenth century's industrial revolution and the capitalism that started to dominate the European economic mechanisms, as well as the population growth, that put a lot of pressure on the old economic bases, caused the spread of poverty, vagabondage and the reduction of basic consumption to unbearable limits in some Italian rural areas. Meanwhile the growth of the demand for labor abroad caused by the major modernization works initiated by the Central European countries (public buildings, railways, roads, and mining) made the Italians from northern Italy, specialists formed during the time of the great public works of the Napoleonic conquest, join easily these works and building sites, establishing a very strong seasonal migratory flow towards other European countries and then to other continents. One of the European countries that received Italian immigrants was Romania, although this chapter is less well-known in historiography. Even though the number of Italians that emigrated to Romania is very low compared to the huge amount of Italian emigrants to other areas, the fact should not be ignored. The regions that provided the most Italian immigrants to Romania were those from North-Eastern Italy: Friuli and Veneto. Moreover, the Venetian and Friulian masters played a decisive role in the accelerated process of modernization and construction of the infrastructure network in several Eastern European countries in the second half of the nineteenth century, including Romania. The Italian presence in Romania in the second half of the nineteenth century must be absolutely connected to the modernization of the Romanian State, to which Italian immigrants contributed greatly: architects, stone cutters, woodcutters, stone workers, traders, artists, builders of railways, bridges, roads, etc. Thus, in that period, there was a severe lack of specialized and skilled people to work in the various industries or even in the agricultural sector which was undergoing mechanization and it was solved by bringing in foreign labor force.