Jim Fiorini’s father was one of the more than two million Italians who emigrated to the US in the first decades of the 1900s, spurred by the promise of the American Dream. He established a successful construction business employing other Italians on work visas, but the Great Depression took its toll.
Fiorini recalls his father being “emotional about his childhood and how things changed for the worse for him by moving to the US.” Now living in Pennsylvania, Fiorini has recently begun investigating his Italian ancestry, hoping to bring his father's “forced emigration full circle” and discover his ‘home’ in Italy.
