Italian Costa Rican
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 2,300 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Coto Brus Canton · San José | |
| Languages | |
| Costa Rican Spanish · Italian | |
| Religion | |
| Roman Catholicism |
Italian Costa Ricans are citizens of Costa Rica who are of Italian ancestry. Most of them reside in San Vito, the capital city of the Coto Brus Canton.
After Cristoforo Colombo discovery of America, only a few Italians -initially mostly from the Republic of Genova- moved to live in the Costa Rica region. The italo-costarican historian Rita Bariatti named Girolamo Benzomi, Stefano Corti, Antonio Chapui, Francesco Granado, and Benito Valerino between those who created important families in colonial Costa Rica . In the 1883 census of Costa Rica there were only 63 Italian citizens and most of them living in the San Jose area, but soon in 1888 there were 1433 Italians working mainly in the creation of new railways.
Indeed in 1888, the railroad brought in laborers from Italy as an alternative workforce. The terrible work conditions prompted them to make the first big strike in Costa Rica and then to leave the railroad project although a group remained in Costa Rica, settling later (some of the descendants) in a government-sponsored colony known as San Vito in the Southern Pacific region.
However one third of those Italian workers of the railways remained in Costa Rica: they created a small but important community .
In the 1930s the Italian community grew in importance, even because some italo-costaricans reached top levels in the political arena:
In 1952, there was an influx of Italian immigrants, mainly farmers, who arrived in southern Costa Rica armed with tractors and other farm machinery, and began to farm the land intensively and to raise cattle. An Italian organization for agricultural colonization purchased 10,000 hectares of land from the government of Costa Rica.
Indeed in the 1950s a group of 500 Italian colonists settled in the area of San Vito (that received this name as an homage to San Vito, an Italian saint).
In 1952, in the midst of the post-war socio-economic crisis in Europe, the two brothers Vito Giulio Cesar and Ugo Sansonetti organised a group of Italian pioneers from forty different places, from Trieste to Taranto, and including a handful from Istria and Dalmatia.
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Wikipedia