America was "discovered" by one Italian (Cristoforo Columbo) and named after another (Amerigo Vespucci). Italians figured prominently in America's early exploration.

Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) planted English and Venetian flags in Maine or Newfoundland, mistakenly considering it the mainland of China. The Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524 explored northward from the Carolina coast to Nova Scotia. The Verrazzano Narrows near New York City is named for him. Friar Marco da Nizza explored in the Southwest where his imagination transformed Zuni pueblos into the gold-inlaid Seven Cities of Cibola. Enrico di Tonti (whom the French try to claim as Henri di Tonti) was "the father of Illinois," and the first European to sail the Great Lakes in 1679. He built Fort St. Louis as LaSalle's chief lieutenant.

But despite this auspicious start, few Italians had settled in America before the nineteenth century. There were four Italian glass blowers in the Jamestown colony in 1621, but they did not get along with the British. George Sandys, secretary of the colony wrote on their departure that "a more damned crew hell never vomited."

While few Italians were involved in the American Revolution, Italian thought on freedom and democracy had great influence, helping to form the ideas that Thomas Jefferson crystallized in the Declaration of Independence. It was in fact from the thesis of his friend, Filippo Mazzei, that Jefferson derived the "inalienable right... that all men are created equal."

One Italian, William Paca, signed the Declaration in 1776. By 1782 he would become the first Italian American to be elected Governor of a state, in this case Maryland.

The exploration (and its financing) continued. Colonel Francesco Vigo financed the Northwest Expedition of Lewis and Clark, and accompanied them through the lands that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In 1823, Giacomo Beltrami discovered the source of the Mississippi River. And Alessandro Malaspina just kept going west, mapping the Pacific from Mexico to Alaska to the Philippines.

As early as 1853, seven years before the north and south of Italy were to be joined into a single nation, the pull of America was already growing. In a petition addressed to the Bourbon (Spanish) Minister of the Interior by the peasants of the Abruzzo village of Vasto the call of the new world could be seen. The petition requested that deforestation then in progress in the area be stopped, since it was interfering with their livelihood and robbing them of firewood. In humble language the petitioners identified themselves as "His Majesty's faithful subjects," but the final sentence warned that unless the request was granted, "the undersigned and all the inhabitants of the Abruzzo region will be compelled to emigrate to California."

A few thousand Italians came across the Atlantic in small groups during the first six or seven decades of the 1800s. Some of them were prominent. Giuseppe Garibaldi, the liberator of Italy, lived for a time on Staten Island. Lorenzo do Ponte, the librettist for Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan Tutti, spent later years in New York.

Others made history in a more humble fashion. Salvatore Catalano piloted "Old Ironsides" during the War of 1812.

In 1850, an Italian Consulate was opened in San Francisco and headed by Colonel Leonetto Cipriani.

Beginning in 1855 Constantino Brumidi began painting the frescos which adorn the Capitol Building dome in Washington D.C.

In 1861, Gaetano Lanza founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And in 1876 the last non-Indian to see Colonel George A. Custer alive at the Little Big Horn was an Italian-American trumpeter named Giovanni Martino whom Custer had sent as a messenger at the last second to ask Captain Benteen for help.

But the 1880 census still reported a total of only forty thousand Italians in the United States - over a fourth of them in New York City.

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, Switzerland or North Africa.

After 1880 the south Italians began to depart in great numbers. With some exceptions they were poor, less well educated, and much more provincial and unsophisticated than the Northerners. Most were contadini (peasant farmers) including the mezzadri, or sharecroppers, who paid rent to absentee landlords half (mezzo) of the wheat, grapes and figs that they were able to coax from the rocky, unfertilized soil. The giornatieri (day laborers) were even less well off, for they had no land to till and had to live mainly on the small amounts of money they could earn at harvest time. Many of our own ancestors were giornatieri, giardinieri (gardeners), carrettieri (cart drivers), zolfatari (sulfur miners), and calzolai (shoe makers).