Italian territorial cultures from the old to the new world. Immigrants, arts and crafts at the origins of manufacturing in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract

Through the swift biographies of a rather wide group of people, the wiseman, whose knowledge lays on a kind of “memorial” sources, deals with the question of the territorial and cultural origins of a visible enterpreneurial effort, which arose between the 19th and 20th century in the ranks of Italian immigration in Latin America.

There the newcomers’ craft origins, ni seldom, rural   (though endowed with working skills typical of craftmanship) mostly seem to get power and models from experience gained in the respective departure areas, mainly situated up north (Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia), although not missing in the South of Borboni (as for Salerno and its province).

An exact picture emerges, dominant since the times of Sombart, of the immigrant as a farmer and cause  of modernization of American societies, regardless – in fact, nearly thanks, in its status -  to a lack of environmental restrictions and cultural heritage, which in this latter case, definitely survives, guiding their action in the economic field and contributing to the main industrial and urban of the most important countries in Latin America, from Brazil to Uruguay.