The memoirs of Giovanni Veltri

About this book

"The Memoirs of Giovanni Veltri, edited by John Potestio (Toronto, 1987), presents the story of a railroad contractor and his Italian navvies from the late nineteenth century to World War I as they made their way throughout the Canadian west and north."--Www.multiculturalcanada.ca/Encyclopedia/A-Z/i11/12. "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 ... ... polyphonic chorus of Ontario's ethnocultural voices. They [the Veltris] remind us that the history of Ontario forms part of a global history of railway and industrial development that drew men and women from the rural peeriphery of the European economy to productive lives on its expanding frontiers in North America."--Back cover.