Chronicle of an Italian family in El Plata

Abstract

This paper describes the arrival in Montevideo and Buenos Aires of the first
members of the Cordiviola family from Lavagna, in the Liguria region. From the study of
family documents, letters, parish records and specific bibliography, the aim is to reconstruct the
various developments of these characters and their descendants, within a chronological
framework of a century, starting in 1840, the year of the first landing in the ports of El Plata,
and extending until the mid-twentieth century. As in any story dealing with migration,
individual destinies are intimately intertwined with the debates of ideas, local political
conditions and the power relations that defined the global order of the time. The family history
that we recall in these pages is narrated in counterpoint with the social, political and economic
circumstances that characterise the Italian and rioplatense contexts of that period, marked by
such significant episodes as the struggles that would lead to Italian unification, the siege of
Montevideo, Garibaldi's participation in the various fronts of struggle, the transition from the
Rosista period to the liberal republic in Argentina, the great epidemic of yellow fever, the
waves of mass immigration to America, among others that are analysed in these pages.