Peppe — Peppe

Twenty-five days, and four million people

The great-grandmother in this lesson is one of a number that is hard to hold in the head. Between roughly 1880 and 1920 something close to thirteen million people left Italy, the largest sustained emigration in modern European history, and Naples was its principal port: the piroscafi that carried them to Buenos Aires, New York and São Paulo sailed from the quay Peppe is walking towards. The great majority came from the South and the Veneto, and a substantial minority came back — the rimpatrio rate across the period was high, and returning twice, as she did, was unremarkable. Two things follow that are still visible. Almost every southern family has this story at a remove of three or four generations, which is why a conversation about where you are from can open into Argentina or New Jersey within two sentences. And the silence Peppe reports — non parlò mai dell'Argentina, mai una parola — is a documented pattern rather than one woman's reticence; the returned emigrants of that generation very often did not talk about it. Note the grammar doing quiet work in that sentence: diceva for the grandmother's habit of saying it, and parlò for the closed fact of the silence, which is the pair this lesson teaches.