Relations between North America and the Italian Peninsula, 1763-1799: Tuscany, Genoa and Naples

Drawing their conclusions from the sparse travel accounts or letters of a few intellectual travellers as being representative of reciprocal interest and knowledge, from the lateness of intellectual exchanges regarding legal or constitutional reforms, and, finally, from the eventual failures of the early diplomatic initiatives, it has now become customary to state that relations between the United States and the Italian states were minimal and insignificant at least until the Risorgimento era. I contend that by concentrating on a few exceptional individuals, on their travel accounts, on diplomatic relations or the failure thereof, or on simply adding one name after in the illusory hope of completing an ideal list of early "migrants" based on ethnicity (often detected solely through the sound of a written name), historians have lost sight of the experience of the hundreds, if not thousands of people, who were constantly crossing the Atlantic Ocean well before 1815. (Comparatively large migrations did not take place before that year, and political or religious motivations will only be visible on a general scale around the 1830s.) More importantly, by concentrating on individual itineraries and destinies historians have often overlooked the fact that most of these people belonged to international networks based on the sharing of common interests. Of course, given the paucity and even the absence of printed sources, the thoughts of these people are difficult to glean, if not altogether lost. Still, the reading of the available archival sources allows the historian to visualize the existence of these phantom participants in the relations between the Italian peninsula and the United States in the late eighteenth century. It also shows that employment opportunities and the business entrepreneurial spirit that were then among their main motivations. In fact, whatever movement of people, good, and ideas took place at the time did so through business or family networks (often one and the same thing) that were an extension of well established networks normally centred in London. In the past decade or so, the potential of this approach has been fully shown.