L'Italo-Americano

F o r m a n y A m e r i - cans, the story of I t a l i a n s i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s begins at the turn of the twentieth century, with steamships, Ellis Island, and the sudden appearance of I t a l i a n n e i g h b o r h o o d s i n cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. That narrative is powerful and largely accurate, but it doesn't tell the whole s t o r y . L o n g b e f o r e m a s s migration, individual Italians were already present in North America, arriving not as part of a unified community, but as traders, soldiers, mis- sionaries, and specialists moving through the colonial w o r l d s o f o t h e r E u r o p e a n empires. Their presence was real, documented, and histori- cally consequential, yet it o f t e n s l i p p e d t h r o u g h t h e cracks of collective memory. One of the clearest early examples is Pietro Cesare Alberti, widely regarded as the first documented Ital- ian resident of New Ams- terdam. Born in Venice in 1608, Alberti arrived in the Dutch colony in 1635, at a time when the settlement was still a fragile outpost on the Atlantic edge of the Dutch c o l o n i a l e m p i r e . A r c h i v a l records show him working as a trader and interpreter, well embedded in the commercial life of the colony. When New Amsterdam later became New York under British rule, we almost lost track of Alberti, who ended up marrying local- ly, integrating fully, and dis- appearing into the broader colonial population. His story r e m a i n s , h o w e v e r , v e r y i m p o r t a n t e v e n w h e n n o l o n g e r a c t i v e l y v i s i b l e , because it illustrates a key p a t t e r n : e a r l y I t a l i a n s i n America were present as indi- viduals, not as a self-con- scious ethnic group, and were therefore absorbed quickly into other identities. That pattern becomes even clearer when the geographical l e n s w i d e n s b e y o n d t h e Atlantic coast; in the Missis- sippi Valley, Italian presence emerges through the figure of Henri de Tonti, born Enrico Tonti in Gaeta in 1649. After emigrating to France, Tonti became a central figure in French colonial expansion in North America, serving as a c l o s e a s s o c i a t e o f R e n é - Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. Tonti played a key role in expeditions along the Mississippi River and in the establishment of early settlements such as Arkansas Post, one of the oldest Euro- p e a n c o m m u n i t i e s i n t h e interior of the continent. While his name survives in place names and historical records, he is rarely remem- b e r e d a s I t a l i a n a t a l l , because his career unfolded under French authority, in French service, and within a French colonial framework. Once again, it wasn't a com- munity, but single individu- als to "carry the Belpaese" to the New World. T h e s a m e d y n a m i c appears in the Spanish-con- trolled territories of North A m e r i c a , p a r t i c u l a r l y i n Florida and along the Gulf Coast. Here, we should add a short note: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Italy did not exist as a unified n a t i o n , b u t m a n y I t a l i a n states were politically or eco- nomically connected to the Spanish Empire and, as a result, Italian sailors, engi- neers, cartographers, and craftsmen frequently entered the Americas as Spanish sub- jects or contractors. In St. Augustine, the oldest con- tinuously occupied European settlement in what is now the U n i t e d S t a t e s , a r c h i v a l research reveals the presence of Italian specialists working within Spanish colonial soci- e t y , i n c l u d i n g G i o v a n n i Battista Boazio, an Italian artist and mapmaker whose detailed engravings of St. Augustine in the late six- t e e n t h c e n t u r y r e m a i n among the earliest visual records of the city. His work, commissioned by English publishers but rooted in first- hand knowledge of Spanish Florida, is also an interesting mirror of the transnational character of early colonial expertise. What makes these Span- ish-period cases particularly interesting is the way Italian identity functioned at the margins of official documen- tation: Italians are technical agents, people valued for skills rather than origins or communitarian relevance, and traces of them survive in maps, engineering plans, shipping records, and mis- sion reports, rather than in narratives of settlement. Religion provided anoth- er lasting pathway for Italian p r e s e n c e , p a r t i c u l a r l y through Franciscan net- works; Italian-born or Ital- ian-trained friars were active across Spanish North Ameri- ca, from Florida to the South- west, and participated in mis- s i o n s t h a t c o m b i n e d evangelization with educa- tion, linguistic documenta- tion, and territorial adminis- t r a t i o n . T h e s e r e l i g i o u s communities produced writ- t e n r e c o r d s , m a p s , a n d reports that deeply influ- enced and formed the Euro- pean knowledge of the Amer- i c a s , a n d w h i l e m o d e r n perspectives rightly critique the colonial mission system, its historical role as a conduit for Italian intellectual and cultural influence is difficult to ignore. Long before Italian immigrants built churches for themselves in American cities, Italian clergy were already shaping religious and educational life in colonial settings. T h e r e i s , p e r h a p s , y e t a n o t h e r c h a r a c t e r i s t i c , besides geography or profes- sion, that brings together these stories: h i s t o r i c a l invisibility. Early Italians in America did not form dense, self-sustaining communities; they arrived under foreign flags, spoke multiple lan- guages, and were recorded in archives as Dutch subjects, French officers, or Spanish servants of the crown. With- out a nation-state behind t h e m ( I t a l y w a s n o t t o become a unified country for another two hundred years) and without a shared ethnic infrastructure, their Italian i d e n t i t y r a r e l y s u r v i v e d beyond a generation. This explains why Italian Ameri- can history appears to begin abruptly in the late nine- teenth century, when mass migration finally created the demographic and cultural conditions necessary for col- lective memory. Seen from this perspec- tive, the later explosion of Italian American life, from mutual aid societies to news- papers, parishes, and politi- cal organizations, was almost a "reappearance," a moment when Italians in America could remain Italian togeth- er, rather than individually. The earlier phase, by con- trast, belongs to a different historical logic, one shaped by empire rather than migra- t i o n , a n d b y p r o f e s s i o n a l mobility rather than family settlement. Recovering these early sto- r i e s , o f c o u r s e , d o e s n o t diminish the significance of Ellis Island; rather, it seems to deepen it by showing that Italian presence in America has a longer, more complex prehistory than commonly assumed, one that mirrors the fragmented political real- ity of pre-unification Italy itself. For us today, especially if interested in the layered nature of identity, this histo- ry offers a useful reminder that belonging is not simply about numbers or visibility, but about the structures – social, political, and cultural – that allow memory to last, and about the many lives that history records only in pass- ing, yet without which the larger story would be incom- plete. FRANCESCA BEZZONE Before Ellis Island: the first Italians in America THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 16 L'Italo-Americano LIFE PEOPLE PLACES EVENTS Ellis Island is a symbol of 19th-century Italian migration to the US, but there were Italians in America earlier (Photo: Predrag Zdravkovic/Dreamstime). Bottom left, a portrait of Enrico Tonti (Attributed to Nicolaes Maes - History Museum of Mobile. Wikicommons. Public Domain)

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