Rudolph Vecoli and Italy

Tirabassi discusses his first meeting with Prof Rudolph J Vecoli in 1972 at the American Library of the University of Florence on the eve of his first study trip to the US. The University of Florence was the very place where American Studies in Italy started and where Italian migration studies developed in a transnational perspective. He says through the years Veloci was generous with his hospitality. He says Vecoli also made generations of Italian migration scholars feel at home in icy Minnesota and was a pioneer in collecting documents from attics, showing them the importance of building up archives through which common people's lives could become part of history. Indeed, Veloci's capacity for collecting documents has been a great lesson for them all.