Shared cultural interest may be why Italians quit the sun to live here

IN SEARCH OF ITALY:Italy's legacy in Ireland has included fine stucco work and an integrated transport system

FOR ITS size, perhaps no other migrant nationality has had such an impact on Ireland as the Italian. And the later the hour on a Saturday night, the more obvious that impact becomes.

According to the last census, there were 6,200 Italians in Ireland. Even if that has risen in the five years since, they are far from being our largest migrant nationality – Polish outnumber them by a factor of 10, British by double that again – although 2006 also saw a spontaneous show of their passion when Italy’s World Cup win brought hundreds of singing, dancing supporters into Temple Bar.

It is lazy to stereotype the Italians as having to do with chippers. The Italians living here now are young workers in high-tech companies, students and businesspeople. They come from all across Italy, where once they came almost entirely from a handful of villages in the province of Frosinone.

And yet, the chippers in almost every town in Ireland, run by the original families of Borzas, Cafollas and Macaris, remain a surprising cultural legacy of 150 years of Italian migration to Ireland. It began with Giuseppe Cervi, an Italian who stepped off a boat at Cobh during the 1880s and walked until he reached Dublin. Selling chips from a hand-cart outside the city’s pubs, he soon opened up his own spot on Dublin’s Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street). There, his wife Palma would ask customers “Uno di questo, uno di quello?”, meaning “One of this and one of the other?” It coined that Dublin phrase, “One and one”.

The chip shop flourished and spread from there (except in Belfast, where they stayed loyal to post-pint oysters). Italians had picked up the trade as they travelled through England and, with quick and spectacular success, in Scotland. As the expertise developed in Ireland, the majority of Italian families travelled here from Frosinone as the subdivision of land at home led to mass migration from rural Italy. The story was recently the subject of a documentary, Chippers, by Irish-based Italian filmmaker Nino Tropiano.

The chipper families were not the first migrants, by any means. Many of our big houses employed Italian stucco workers, and the tiling, glasswork and ornamental woodwork at Belfast’s Crown Bar is a famous example of Italian craft – they completed it while moonlighting between work on Catholic churches.

Meanwhile, the country’s first integrated transport system came through the enterprising Charles Bianconi who, in 1815, set up a coach service.

He was a purveyor of gilded frames, and this was partly in response to having to lug the goods around on his back. The first route ran out of Clonmel to Cahir, but routes soon criss-crossed the country, earned him a decent fortune and changed the nature of Irish travel for good.

Today, it is a more integrated Europe that brings Italians here. “Many Italians love Ireland,” says Angela Tangianu, director of the Italian Institute of Culture in Dublin, which is supported by the Italian state.

Her personal observations are that many Italians find life here easier than home, that the people are friendly and there is a shared interest in culture, which may explain how Italians leave the sun behind to come here.

“I frequently hear people saying that they arrived here for one week or one month but stayed for three years, or 10.”