Author Description

"Giovanni Veltri... helped begin the process of "globalizing" the Calabrian town of Grimaldi by working on the frontiers of European capitalism in North Africa and North America. Many Italian towns have migreation traditions as precise and effective as that of Grimaldi. In most cases the historical origins of the patterns of leaving and returning have become obscured by the mythopoeic power of each family's account of its own migration chain, or by the interruption, and often the altering of migration targets, which came with two wars and a changing map of the flow of labour [labor] to capital... allows the historian to see how the first probing of opportunity by a few pioneer migrants, such as the Veltris, influenced the town's mental map of the world, its migration tradition, for almost a century...