Abstract Italy is a country with a long history of emigration and a very short experience of immigration. Mass emigration started with Italian unification: during the period 1861–1976 over 26 million people emigrated, half of them towards other European countries, the rest towards North and South America. Two-fifths of all these emigrations originated from the regions in the south of Italy. The reasons were, on the one hand, the slow and difficult development of the Italian economy and, on the other, the economic expansion which characterized other countries between the second half of the nineteenth century and the First World War. After the Second World War, Italians emigrated mostly towards Europe, especially Germany. In the same years, the development of the industrial north stimulated mass internal migration from the south to the north west.