{"id":87,"date":"2023-02-15T19:17:16","date_gmt":"2023-02-15T19:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/italian-american.com\/?page_id=87"},"modified":"2023-05-21T17:56:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-21T17:56:00","slug":"famous-italian-americans","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/italian-american.com\/famous-italian-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Famous Italians – Becoming Americans in the New World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The role of Italians in American history should not be underestimated. For starters, America was “discovered” by one Italian, Christopher Columbus<\/a>, and named after another, Amerigo Vespucci.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Early on, other Italians figured prominently, as well. Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot<\/a>) planted English and Venetian flags in Maine or Newfoundland, Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 explored northward from the Carolina coast to Nova Scotia. One (alleged) Italian, William Paca<\/a>, signed the Declaration in 1776. By 1782 he would become Governor of Maryland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the Italians were few and far between in those first few centuries. Then during the first decades of the 1800s, a slow trickle of emigrants from Italy started. Some of them were prominent. Giuseppe Garibaldi<\/a>, the liberator of Italy, lived for a time on Staten Island. Lorenzo da Ponte<\/a>, the librettist of Mozart, spent later years in New York and even taught at Columbia College as their (first) professor of Italian literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the 1880 census still reported a total of only 40,000 Italians in the United States, over a quarter of them in New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That figure was destined to grow rapidly. Until Italy unified in 1861-1871, most emigration had been strictly forbidden. For a couple of decades after that, most immigrants were from northern Italy and left not for America, but for seasonal work in France, Germany, or Switzerland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After 1880, Italians from the south of the country began to depart in great numbers. With some exceptions they were poor, less educated, and much more provincial and unsophisticated than the Northerners. <\/p>\n\n\n\n