Immigration fromItaly in the late 1800s and early 1900s

In the story, Baldasare moves to California in 1905, after having emigrated to America fromItaly several years before. He was not alone. The last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth witnessedAmerica's biggest period of Italian immigration. The Italians had powerful reasons to leave their homeland. In 1870, following the conquest of Rome and the unification of Italy into one state, many Italians experienced a crushing poverty, brought on by political chaos, overpopulation, and an overabundance of agricultural products that caused a massive deflation in the market. Seeking a better life, many Italians emigrated to other countries. "By the end of the century more than 5.3 million Italians of all ages had emigrated, nearly half a million more than Italy's population growth up to that point," Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale note in their book...