‘Over 26 million Italians emigrated abroad, in just a century since the unification of Italy: even before 1914, more than 14 million citizens had left Italy. Over half of them had gone to America. This, in crude numbers, is the picture of a mass phenomenon which deeply influenced the demographic, social, cultural and economical reality of modern Italy, both at a national and at a regional level. The time of the so called “American fever” spanned over a few decades around the turn of the centurys: it saw a massive exodus which no other European country had gone through with the same intensity (almost 900,000 in 1913 only). The countryside and struggling industries were abandoned by poor and exploited people who decided to follow the dream of easily making a fortune across the Atlantic, the mirage of ‘making America’ in a short space of time. The photographic exhibition on Italian emigration to America is an invitation to ‘read’, through pictures which faithfully show the social environment of the time, the contribution given by the Italians to the development of American society. The exhibition has been realised with the help of CSER (Emigration Studies Centre – Roma) run by the Scalabriniani Fathers and of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Sister Francesca Saverio Cabri-ni. Photographs from the exhibition “Religious Feasts of the Italian-Americans in New York”, will also be displayed.’