Working on the Railroad

In nineteenth-century Italy, illiteracy was the normal condition of a great majority of the population, particularly in rural areas. There was no school in Colognora, a hamlet in the flatlands near Lucca, Tuscany, in those first years of a unified Italy, so it is not known how Antonio Andreoni, who was born there in 1859 to a peasant family, learned how to read and write. But among the Andreoni family, in fact, literacy appears to have been a family tradition, judging by the books found in their home, some of which, bearing the handwriting of Andreoni's father and uncle, were published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here, Predelli relates Andreoni's experience as an immigrant laborer with a maintenance gang along the Northern Pacific Railway between Mandan ND and Miles City MT in the years 1901-1902.