A05 The land

This area invites reflection on the importance of the land and peasant labour within the scope of the great historical emigration.

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millions of Italians cultivated land that they did not own, in a precarious and poverty-stricken situation in which they were unable to take advantage of the harvests, which belonged to the landowners, often masters of extensive landed estates. Others were bound by sharecropping contracts and were often forced, when these contracts were renewed, to move with their families to other fields and other homes. Similarly, even those who owned small plots of land lived with the uncertainty of what the harvest would bring. In this experiential substratum a dream blossomed in these people: that of land ownership as a guarantee of a future for themselves and their children. Dreams, hopes and illusions on which emigration agents and speculators leveraged in promoting the imaginary of fertile foreign “lands” that were easy to cultivate and were available in abundance to anyone who wished to take them.

Many left taking seeds from home with them to plant in the new, promised land. In this ideal “garden”, you will find some varieties of vegetables and aromatic plants whose aromas and flavours accompanied the migrants to make their new land their own.