Northern Italy’s (Sondrio Province) Economic and Political History/Milieu Contributing to Villa di Tirano’s Transoceanic Migration by Residents in the 1850/60s.

Excerpt from Migration Patterns from two Comuni in Sondrio Province: Tirano and Villas di Tirano by Alan Poletti and Emanuella Menghina.  IHS Journal :

“The province of Sondrio consists essentially of two valleys, the smaller, the Valchiavenna in the west and the larger, the Valtellina, traversed by the upper Adda river in the east.   Both villages open onto Lake Como.  Tirano and Villa di Tirano are in the Valtellina and lie approximately 50km from the lake.   Only 70% of the land in the province is cultivable.  This hardly provided an easy living and a widespread system of seasonal migration to neighbouring states was the norm for some centuries.  Driven by harsh economic reality from the 1850s onwards it is not surprising that people from the province would be among the first transoceanic migrants from Italy.  Their destinations were America (both North and South) and also Australia.  Jaqueline Templeton in her 1995 paper (‘the Swiss connection: the origins of the Valtellina-Australia migrations -  Australian Historical Studies)  has discussed the reasons for the marked preference of the Valtellinese to migrate to Australia whereas those from Valchiavenna largely chose America…. In 1512, the Grigioni from the Swiss Canton immediately to the north conquered the Valtellina and were to rule it until 1797 … Sondrio province has always been a border land, but for those nearly 300 years, the border was to its south- catholics ruled by protestants,  In 1797, the French were welcomed with high expectations, however their rule was much more repressive than that of the Grigioni (Swiss).  The border was now immediately to the north of Tirano and Villa di Tirano were right on it. (same border today).  With the congress of Vienna in 1815  the Austrians became their new rulers.  They inherited a desperately poor province with hardly any a road worthy of the name, and the valley land mainly marshy and subject to frequent flooding.  …. the economy (by 1828)  already hit  by the incompetence and repression of the French went from bad to worse.  Wine produced from the terraced slopes on the northern side of the valley of the Adda (river) was overwhelmingly the most important export from the Valtellina.  The very good prices for wine in the years 1813 to 1817 encouraged a big increase in grape plantings, so that by 1845, the area of land in vineyards was twice that in 1800.  However, inevitably this huge increase in output led to very low prices.  That would have been enough but a ‘mistake’ in calculating the land tax led to an excessively high land tax that was quite unsupportable.  Worse was to come…the grapes failed disastrously for 14 years from 1847.  Stefano Jacini in 1858 called Sondrio province the ‘Ireland of Lombardy’. “ (The province of Sondrio is located in the canton of Lombardy)  

Administrators’ comments:

As will be discussed in a following blog Giovanni Borserio was the youngest child in his family and with an older male sibling he was unlikely to inherit the modest family property that at its best during an economic recession was unable to sustain a living for a large extended family led to him choose, like many of Villa di Triano’s menfolk, to migrate to Australia.