Marriage Act

Imagine leaving a poor land, where you cannot envision a future, or rather, where the present itself makes clear that it will not be a happy one. You board a boat with thousands of others, migrants as desperate as you are, with little or nothing, often alone. You arrive in a foreign country, the so-called “land of opportunity,” where many before you have chosen to go. You do not speak the language, you do not have a home, in fact you have nothing, and you possess only a few skills: manual labor. And so you begin again, with your hands.

It was 1914 when Pietro Temeladri decided to leave Zoppola, a small town in the province of Pordenone in Italy, little more than a road and a few scattered houses. He was 27 when he arrived in Argentina and began building houses, like many Italian emigrants of that era. He settled in Laboulaye, in the province of Córdoba. After a few years, he married, as this marriage certificate records, Carolina Concati, who was born in Argentina but was the daughter of Italian migrants. In this document, Pietro became Pedro.

By that time, Pedro was no longer just a worker. He became the owner of a construction company. In Laboulaye, he financed the construction of the monument to Christopher Columbus, the Italian Society building, and the local church, which he never saw completed. Another document records his death, which occurred far from both his homes, in Buenos Aires.

One hundred and thirty-one years after Pedro’s birth, I, his great-grandson, was able, thanks to these documents and a birth certificate, to apply for Italian citizenship and build my future in Europe, perhaps the same future my great-grandfather had once imagined.