For many Americans, the story of Italians in the United States begins at the turn of the twentieth century, with steamships, Ellis Island, and the sudden appearance of Italian neighborhoods in cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. That narrative is powerful and largely accurate, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Long before mass migration, individual Italians were already present in North America, arriving not as part of a unified community, but as traders, soldiers, missionaries, and specialists moving through the colonial worlds of other European empires. Their presence was real, documented, and historically consequential, yet it often slipped through the cracks of collective memory.
