ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Gone, But Never Gone — The Abruzzese Diaspora
Next week, I'm boarding a flight to Abruzzo for three months of work on this very project — and even with a return ticket in my pocket, I can't stop thinking about leaving without my wife. That ache is what sent me down this road: what did it feel like for the people who left Abruzzo with no return date at all?
In this episode, I trace the story of the Abruzzese diaspora — one of the largest and least-told migration stories in Italian history. We go back to the collapse of farming and herding in the 1870s, follow the wave that peaked around 1913 to Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, and sit with the postwar years that sent men to Canada, Australia, and into Belgium's coal mines under the "men for coal" agreement — the same mines that led to the Marcinelle disaster. Along the way: the Pennsylvania and West Virginia mining tragedies that swallowed up men from Abruzzo's own Roveto Valley, the household names you didn't know were Abruzzese (Perry Como, Dean Martin, Madonna's family), and a city-by-city look at where Abruzzesi built new lives — New York, Boston, Toronto, Sydney, and beyond.
This one is personal. I share my own family's story — my great-grandfather Antonio, who left for work before being conscripted and killed on the Isonzo front in 1917, and my grandmother's uncle, Zio Giuseppe, who emigrated to Pennsylvania and became one of my family's open mysteries. If you have any connection to the Di Vincenzo family of Lettopalena, I'd love to hear from you.
The diaspora didn't end in the 1950s — it's still happening today. This episode is about the ones who left, the ones who stayed, and everything that gets carried across an ocean either way.
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