Why You Should Visit Italy’s ‘Ellis Island’ Museum

13.09.2023 - 12:19 / forbes.com

New York’s Ellis Island Museum pays tribute to the millions of emigrants who sailed into New York harbor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in search of a better life. The largest group of soon-to-be expats came from Italy; their exodus created one the greatest diasporas in human history.

A recently opened museum in Genoa, MEI (the National Museum of Italian Emigration), now serves as a spiritual cousin to the Ellis Island site by looking at expatriation from the perspective of departure. MEI provides a compelling overview of the Italian peninsula’s migration history, not only during the peak years of the 19th and 20th centuries, but also from prehistoric times to the present. Additionally, the museum details migration within Italy, when Italians, in large numbers starting inthe 1950s, moved from the countryside to cities, and from South to North in search of work.

While MEI delves deeply into the past, it is very much a 21st-century creation with three floors of multimedia installations, displays and interactive stations. “All the collection are digitized,” says Giorgia Barzetti, co-curator (with Nicla Buonasorte) for MEI. “The original documents are not in the museum, but spread [out] in Italian and international archives, museums or research centers.”

Genoa, like Naples, Palermo and Trieste, was a key embarkation point for those leaving the country (not only for the U.S., but also to other destinations including Brazil, Argentina, Africa and Australia), one reason the museum was established here. Another plus was the fact that Genoa had already committed to the cultural study of Italian migration with a special section devoted to it at its Galata Maritime Museum.

The museum site has special resonance too. It is located in the Commenda di San Giovanni di Prè, a medieval ecclesiastical and former hospital complex dating from 1180 that once served as a way station for religious pilgrims making their own long-distance journeys by sea to the Holy Land.

One of the first thematic sections, on the museum’s ground floor, underscores how migration has always been a fundamental human activity, and traces the Italian peninsula’s earliest population movements, the subsequent nomadic routes of early sailors and herders, and later the peregrinations of merchants, artisans and artists to points beyond.

In 1880, roughly two decades after the country’s unification, the first mass exodus from Italy began. The museum tells the personal experiences of over 200 Italians who left their homeland (from the late 19th century to the present) to seek new lives through a collection of personal artifacts, diaries, photos, letters, newspaper clippings and videos.

One intriguing section called The Maze lets visitors