Where did they come from? When? Why did they leave a country known for its beauty? What trades did they bring with them? Why Canada — so cold, so different from their homeland? How did they build a new life in this new land?

Photo: © Vincenzo Pietropaolo

There are so many stories to tell. Each immigrant has a story as unique as the key to his or her family home. Guided by the values they hold dear, each has followed a unique path in pursuit of dreams and aspirations, taking chances and experiencing success and failure along the way.

A profile drawn from such a wealth of stories may be a simplification, but it does provide some points of reference. It can help us understand why, over the course of a century, half a million people from rural Italy came to Canada, a country that had entered the modern age. What it meant to them ... and to us.