The Arbëreshë: the Albanians of Italy

Why they came

The name says where they came from: Arbër or Arbëri was what the land of today's Albania was called in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first Albanians came to Italy as soldiers. In 1448 King Alfonso V of Aragon settled Albanian troops under Demetrio Reres in twelve villages around Catanzaro in Calabria, and a year later four villages in Sicily followed.

In 1461 Skanderbeg himself crossed the Adriatic with several thousand soldiers to support King Ferdinand I of Naples, and his men received land in Apulia. After Skanderbeg died in Lezha on 17 January 1468 and the Ottomans conquered one Albanian fortress after another, the soldiers were followed by families, villages and whole communities. His widow Donika also asked the king to let her family settle in Naples.

The migration did not happen all at once. Historians distinguish several waves stretching into the eighteenth century. One of the largest came in 1532 to 1534, when around two thousand people left the fortress town of Koroni in the Peloponnese; Emperor Charles V granted them privileges and tax exemptions in the Kingdom of Naples.

Where they live

Over the centuries the Arbëreshë founded almost a hundred settlements. Today 50 communities remain, 41 of them independent municipalities, spread across seven regions: Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily. Calabria and Sicily have the largest groups. Estimates speak of around 100,000 Arbëreshë in Italy; the number of people who still speak the language was estimated at about 80,000 in 2002.

The best-known village is Piana degli Albanesi above Palermo. Its foundation was officially approved on 30 August 1488 after the refugees had asked the archbishop of Monreale for land. For centuries it was called Piana dei Greci, because of the Greek rite of its church; on 30 August 1941 it took the name it carries today. The town is officially bilingual, with street signs in Albanian and Italian.

In the early twentieth century, emigration to the Americas hit the communities hard. Between 1900 and 1910 and again between 1920 and 1940, about half of the Arbëresh villages lost a large part of their population.

A language from before the Ottomans

Arbërisht developed from Tosk, the southern Albanian dialect. Because its speakers left the Balkans so early, it kept archaic features from the time before the Ottoman conquest. At the same time it went its own way for five centuries: linguists estimate that only around 45 percent of its vocabulary matches modern Albanian, and about 15 percent consists of new formations.

Italy's law number 482 of 15 December 1999 protects the Arbëreshë as one of the country's historic linguistic minorities, and the regions of Calabria, Basilicata and Molise name the language in their statutes. Even so, it is considered endangered, because fewer and fewer young people grow up speaking it.

The church of the Arbëreshë

The settlers brought their priests and icons with them, and with them the Byzantine rite. Instead of becoming Latin Catholics like their neighbours, many Arbëresh communities kept the Eastern liturgy while being in union with Rome. Out of this grew the Italo-Albanian Catholic Church, which celebrates in Greek and Albanian. In 1919 the Eparchy of Lungro was established for the mainland, and on 26 October 1937 the Eparchy of Piana degli Albanesi for Sicily.

Easter in Piana degli Albanesi shows how much of this tradition has survived. The Gospel is read in seven languages, a procession in traditional Arbëresh costume moves through the town, and red eggs are handed out in the square. The costumes are among the most elaborate in Italy; in 1928 the local group won first prize at a costume competition in Venice.

Poets of a distant homeland

For Albanian literature the Arbëreshë are indispensable. Luca Matranga, who lived from 1567 to 1619, wrote the first work of Italo-Albanian literature, a religious translation. Giulio Variboba, born in 1724, is regarded by many as the first true poet writing in Albanian, and Nicola Chetta wrote the first Albanian sonnet in 1777.

The most important of them was Girolamo de Rada, born in 1814 in Macchia Albanese in Calabria. He studied at the college of Sant'Adriano in San Demetrio Corone, which had moved there in 1794. His Songs of Milosao appeared in Naples in 1836, and in 1848 he founded L'Albanese d'Italia, a bilingual paper described as the first Albanian-language periodical anywhere. Through his work, the Albanians of Italy became one of the sources of the Albanian national awakening in the Balkans.

Gjitonia and vallje

Two words describe what holds the Arbëresh villages together. Gjitonia is the neighbourhood, a circle of houses whose families help each other and share joy and grief. Vallje are the traditional dances, among them the sword dance, which the Arbëreshë kept alive. The songs about Skanderbeg also survived in Italy as a whole cycle of their own.

Five hundred years after their ancestors crossed the sea, the Arbëreshë are Italians, and yet they have kept their language, their rite and their dances. They are the proof that heritage does not need a border to survive.

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The eagle, pressed into leather

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1. Wikipedia: Arbëreshë people
2. Wikipedia (de): Arbëresh
3. Wikipedia: Piana degli Albanesi
4. Wikipedia: Italo-Albanian Catholic Church
5. Wikipedia: Girolamo de Rada