I heard that the Italians who immigrated to America in the late 1800s/early 1900s were mainly from Southern Italy. This makes intuitive sense to me, because southern Italy historically has been poorer than northern Italy. Is this true?
They were roughly equally divided between North and South, although in two different time periods.
From the 1870s to the early 1900s we can see a greater amount of emigrants from the regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto and Friuli which totals around 3 million people on the total of 3.7 million emigrants for the whole of the Center-Northern part of the country. This opposes the 1.5 million leaving the South, where half a milion just from Campania.
In the next century, the situation changes significantly, as the two amounts nearly equal themselves where from 1901 to 1915 4.6 million Italians left the North and 4.1 left the South. Once more, the most populous regions of the peninsula - Lombardy, Veneto, Piedmont, Friuli, Campania, Sicily - were the top contributors to these digits.
Giving a closer look, in the second wave of emigration, the aformentioned Northern regions saw a similar "output" of people leaving to those of the previous decades, whereas the South had more than the double, with the most of those who were leaving came from Sicily and Campania, both contributing to the construction of the Italian stereotype abroad and especially in the U.S. where these people, which in some proportion (although unclear to this day) were already connected with criminal organizations that were partially trasplanted, gave life to the Italian mobster figure of the 1920s and 1930s.
The numbers I've been quoting come from an elaboration of the National Institute of Statistic (Istat in Italian) and there is a handy map that shows the proportions.
Sources:
Rosoli, G., Un secolo di emigrazione italiana (1876-1976), Roma, Centro studi emigrazione, 1978.
