Publisher's Synopsis
"You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-grandparents and thirty-two great-grandparents, one of them must be Italian."
This sentence is a fact for a huge number of Brazilians. Brazil received approximately 1.5 million Italian immigrants in a space of about 50 years. Today their descendants number about 30 million people (15% of the country's population). That's practically half of the entire Italian diaspora around the globe.
Brazil has become the country that concentrates the largest number of oriundi around the world, the descendants maintain some of the traditional Italian customs, which have also spread to the rest of the Brazilian population without ancestors originating in Italy. Some customs that are considered very Brazilian were actually imported from Italy. All over the country we can see families that meet every Sunday for lunch, the main dish is usually pasta.
In the state of Paraná this legacy is even more special, for approximately 3.7 million people from Paraná, about 30% of the state's population, their family origins are in Italy.
Not surprisingly, this ethnic group was - and still is - responsible for building a country that is still going through a construction process. Its agriculture, manual work, entrepreneurship and specialization have transformed Brazil's socioeconomic scenario. Its fine arts, architecture, music, gastronomy and its Christianity - more specifically Catholicism - definitely shaped Brazilian culture, from large urban centers to the most remote countryside. Italian-Brazilian figures became famous in the fields of politics and law, sports and the fine arts. Italian surnames are so common that they don't sound foreign, accents and expressions from certain parts of the country sound more Italian than Portuguese, in short, the Italians made Brazil the country it is today and Paraná exist as it exists.
This book tries to recount the history of these immigrants, a practically impossible work, because each person is a world and each immigrant carries his own story. Anyway, this work rescues the memory of immigrants so that it will never be forgotten.
