Internal migration in Italy

After the marriage between the Norman king Roger I of Sicily with Adelaide del Vasto, member of Aleramici family, many Lombard colonisers left their homeland, in the Aleramici's possessions in Piedmont and Liguria, to settle on the island of Sicily.

Corsica passed from the Republic of Genoa to France in 1769 after the Treaty of Versailles, while Savoy and the area around Nice passed from the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia to France in 1860 as a consequence of the Plombières Agreement; Francization occurred in both cases and caused a near-disappearance of the Italian language as many of the Italian speakers in these areas migrated to Italy.

It was the one that involved the transfer of seasonal migrants from the "irredent" territories, not yet annexed to the mother country (Trentino-Alto Adige and Julian March), to the nearby Kingdom of Italy.

[2] After World War II, under the Treaty of Peace with Italy, 1947, the territories of the Kingdom of Italy (Istria, Kvarner, most of the Julian March as well as the Dalmatian city of Zara) first occupied by the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia of Marshal Josip Broz Tito and subsequently annexed by Yugoslavia, caused the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus.

[19] With the fall of Fascist regime in 1943, and the end of World War II in 1945, a large internal migratory flow began from one Italian region to another.

[2] These migratory movements were accompanied by other flows of lesser intensity, such as transfers from the countryside to smaller cities and travel from mountainous areas to the plains.

[2] The main reasons that gave rise to this massive migratory flow were linked to the living conditions in the places of origin of the emigrants (which were very harsh), the absence of stable work,[1][15] the high rate of poverty, the poor fertility of many agricultural areas, the fragmentation of land properties,[20] which characterized southern Italy above all, and the insecurity caused by organized crime.

[1] The migratory flow was so large that the Ferrovie dello Stato set up a special convoy, called the Treno del Sole (Train of the Sun), which departed from Palermo and arrived in Turin after having crossed the entire Italian peninsula.

[15] Then began the slow decline of emigration, with the migratory flows from Veneto which, already at the end of the 1960s, stopped[2] due to the improved living conditions in these places.

[1] In Turin this migratory peak was exacerbated by FIAT, which carried out a recruitment campaign where 15,000 migrants from the south were hired.

[1] After 1970 there was a strong contraction in arrivals, which occurred during the 1973 oil crisis, and many of the migrants returned to their places of origin.

The regions most active in receiving internal immigrants are Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, and Umbria.