Memories of Italian immigration to South America

My bisnonna left Italy with only 4 years of age, in 1889, in a ship called “Rosario”, which travelled from Genoa all the way to Argentina.  It was a steamship (vapore or piroscafo in Italian), 282 feet long, with a speed of 14 knots, that could carry 48 people in first class, 40 people in second class, and up to 1,065 emigrants in third class. A third-class ticket from Genoa to Buenos Aires costed 350 Lire and the journey took 23 days. In this case, it is known that the ship arrived in Buenos Aires in 11/02/1889, but I don’t know which day it left Genoa. The final destination was probably Rosario, where they would have arrived at a later date: many ships had previous scales in Barcelona, Santos, Rio de Janeiro. Rosario, up the river from Buenos Aires, would be the last stop. You can see the usual itinerary below.

(The old steamship and its long journey reminds me a bit of Fellini’s film “E La Nave Va”, although the story there takes place at a later date, 1914, and the ship is not a migrant ship.)

The list of passengers, which can be consulted here, here or here, indicates also the age of each passenger, their profession, and whether they could read or not. Ida’s mother, 41, was listed as housewife, and could not read. Neither could her father and Ida’s older brothers, also travelling in the same ship.

Yet, in a later record, the Argentine census of 1895, Ida is already 11 years old and can read (her parents still cannot). Her brothers, 12 and 16, can also read and are already working — as “talabarteros”, or saddlers. Ida would marry at 17 and become a housewife. She gave birth to my grandmother, her third child, when she was 25. She never went back to Italy.

Immigration is a complicated issue, then as today. I do not wish to say that all migration movements are the same (and there are reasons to believe that the current massive immigration under globalism is much more harmful than that old-time immigration), but it sure caused many changes in society, then as now. In a relatively short time, Buenos Aires and Rosario became heavily Italian cities. Rosario, which was also my birth town, was a small village until the mid-19th century and it developed exactly because of immigration. In 1832, Charles Darwin, in his famous Beagle journey to South America, passed through the town and calculated the number of inhabitants as around 2,000.

But in 1889, the year my grand-grandmother arrived, the population was already at more than 50,000 people, and at least 20% of those were Italians — that is, people who were born in Italy, not counting their descendants. Another 20% were immigrants from other regions, mostly from Spain. In total, at least 40% of the population, and probably more, was of migrant origin.

The ship? Built in 1887 England by Wigham Richardson & Co in the Neptune Yard in the Tyne river, it was first sold to an Italian company, Fratelli Lavarello, under which my bisnonna and family traveled. After the bankruptcy of that company, it was sold to the more famous Italian company La Veloce, which kept the ship with the same name and roughly the same route. In 1898, the ship was sold to a French company, Companie Mixte de Navegation, and started doing the route from Marseille to Algiers; it was also renamed “Djurjura”. Below we see it in the port of Marseille, around the turn of the century.

In January 1915, during the First World War, it was requisitioned by the French Army to transport French troops, mostly to the failed Dardanelles expedition against the Turks. In a return trip, in December 1915, empty except for the crew, it collided off the coast of Malta with a Canadian ship, Empress of Britain, another passenger ship requisitioned for military uses. Two French stokers died in the collision, the rest of the crew (62 people) were rescued. Almost cut in two by the larger and more powerful ship, Djurjura, the former Rosario, the piroscafo that took my ancestors to Argentina, sank to the bottom of the sea. Sad, perhaps, but I suppose that at least it’s a more romantic ending than a junkyard. 

Why are so many bicycles stolen?

I had my bicycle stolen earlier today. I suppose it is my fault, as I left it unattended and unlocked for five minutes in front of the building. And yet, I had done the same thing other times, for longer periods, and nothing had happened. I guess it was unlucky that a thief was just passing by just at that time, protected by the anonymity of a lazy Sunday morning, as most people around were innocently going to church or taking their children to the park nearby.

I don’t know how many bicycles I had stolen from me along my life. I suppose something between 5 and 10, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they were more than 10. At least two bicycles were stolen inside private property (my building’s parking lot or garage). The worst one was a brand new $ 500 bicycle stolen from inside my garage when I lived in Los Angeles. Since then, I took care to only buy cheap, used bicycles costing lest than $ 50, so they could be easily replaced, and the pain of the loss would not be so harsh. It was the case of the recent one, which had costed $ 40.

Thanks for reading Contrarium! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Bicycle theft is an international business. I had bicycles stolen in Brazil, in the United States, in Canada and in Germany (at least three just in Germany!). According to an article, one bicycle is stolen every 30 seconds in most major cities in the world, and the number of stolen bicycles is constantly increasing. It only seems to get worse every year — apparently, bicycle theft exploded during the pandemic. More than 200,000 bicycles are stolen every year just in the United States, and those are the reported thefts. Since most thefts are unreported (and, let’s face it, reporting is pretty useless: it’s not as if the police will have detectives working in shifts to find your bike), the real number is two or three times that.

Part of the problem seems to be that it is relatively easy to steal bikes — even if they are protected by locks, since most of them provide little actual protection against a determined thief — and there is minimal punishment. Most bicycle thieves are never caught, and most stolen bicycles are never recovered. It is a crime without punishment.

The classic Italian neorealist film “Bicycle Thieves” (Ladri di Biciclette, 1948) paints a sympathetic portrayal of a poor man, during the hard times of postwar Italy, who has his bicycle stolen and therefore becomes unable to go to work; desperate, he finally tries to steal another man’s bicycle and ends up being caught.

The film, by Vittorio De Sica, is a deserved classic, but I think it paints a faulty portrayal of bicycle thieves. I really doubt anyone, especially these days, becomes a bike thief because he had his own bike stolen and could not go to work anymore.

No, far from being desperate poor men who just want support their family, bicycle thieves are deeply amoral and psychopathic individuals, who are constantly on the prowl for suckers who leave their bikes unattended or secured with cheap locks. After they hypocritically carry or ride your own bicycle through town as if it was their own, those appalling criminals sell it cheaply for parts and use the money to buy drugs or booze. Only this can explain why my own bicycle, an old, defective piece of junk purchased at a second-hand shop for 40 euros, could have been taken away.

In some Islamic countries, thieves are punished by having their right hand cut off. While the punishment seems to me exaggerated as a general rule, it might be adequate in the case of bicycle thieves. Perhaps they should also have one of their feet removed, so they can never ride a bicycle again.

Everything has an upside, however. The shift system in my bicycle wasn’t working, and the light system also needed to be changed. I remember that I was bothered thinking that I needed to work to fix those problems (just buying the parts needed to fix those issues would probably cost more than the bike itself).

But I don’t need to worry about it anymore, and it is a load off my mind. Now that’s a problem for the thief. Perhaps he will be kind enough to fix it himself before selling it to someone else, or perhaps he will have a deserved bike accident as he rides away with the product of his crime.

And I just need to buy a new $40 bike, until it is stolen, once again.

Thanks for reading Contrarium! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.