Serious immigration from Italy began in the 1880s. Montreal was a favourite destination since it was easy to get to from Italy and offered opportunities for unskilled workers. Southern Italians arrived first and almost all were men who left the depressed agriculture regions of Sicily, Napoli and Calabria. Other would follow from impoverished towns near Rome and the more northern regions of Tuscany, Friuli, and Piedmont.
The first groups passed through Montreal in the late 1880s. They were men who helped build the railways and canals or worked in forests and mines. Most returned to Italy in the winter, as they found full-time work in the cities. With settlement, immigration increased despite a directive that said: �No steps are to be taken to assist or encourage Italian immigration.� But bureaucratic indifference in Canada was better than poverty in Italy, so they kept on coming.
Most Italians lived in the parish of Mont-Carmel, in blocks around Dorchester Boulevard (now Rene-Levesque) from St. Laurent to St. Denis. Many newcomers had been promised jobs while they were still in Italy. They were recruited by Italians who had come earlier; men, called padrones, who were agents for the steamship companies, mines, and railroads. The most notorious padrone was Antonio Cordasco. His St. James (St. Jacques) street office, in the heart of Montreal�s old financial district, was next to the Canadian Pacific Railway, probably the largest employer of immigrant labour in the country, with almost 4 000 men passing his office looking for work in 1904. Paying him $10 each to find them work. However, by the end of 1904, the government had formed a Royal Commission into the Immigration of Italian Labourers to Montreal and the publicity drove out Cordasco and other padrones, but it would be decades before the lives of most Italians would improve. Italians were drawn to Montreal because it was a Catholic city, but they found they didn�t fit in with the overwhelming French-Canadian Catholic establishment. Priests couldn�t preach or give sacraments in Italian and the service was different.
By 1905, the Montreal Italian Catholic community was strong enough to demand its own parish on the corner of Dorchester and St. Andre. Molson�s brewery owned the land and donated it to the community. The church held a few hundred people but served thousands. It set a precedent since its territory was ethnic and was technically the largest parish in the city, serving Italians from Redpath Avenue to Delormier in the east, and ran from Mount Royal Avenue in the north to the St. Lawrence River. The parish, called Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, has since relocated to St. Leonard.
By 1911, there were 7 000 Italians in Montreal, mostly men who worked on construction projects. Many were moving away from the core of the city to areas where they could buy land, build homes, grow fruit and vegetables, and write back home to say they had become landowners. The most popular areas were in Montcalm and Mile End in the north and Ville Emard and NDG in the west.
Mile-End was the largest of these communities. It sprang up between St. Laurent and St. Denis and its name came from the CPR station of Mile End at the corner of Bellechase and St. Lawrence. By 1930, half of Montreal�s Italian community, lived in the Montcalm-Mile End area and 6 000 lived within a few blocks of Dante Street in Mile End�s Little Italy.
In 1910, a second Italian parish was created with a church at the corner of Dante and Henri Julien. At that time, there was talk of extraordinary events taking place in the Italian region of Campobasso. Several people claimed to have seen the Virgin appear and ruins of an old church were found in the nearby district of La Difesa. Since many of the new residents in Mile End came from Campobasso, they called the new church La Madonna Della Disesa- Our Lady of Protection. The parish was huge, 18 square miles, with a territory that covered 28 French Canadian and five Irish Catholic churches. This new parish had over 10 800 members. Montreal�s Italian community had come a long way from the village parish ministering to individual religious needs.
However, Italian immigration slowed down after 1930. This was partly because it was easier to get into Canada if you were British, American, or from Northern Europe. At the same time, Mussolini, Italy�s dictator from 1924 to 1943 discouraged emigration. During the 1930s more people left Canada for Italy than immigrated here.
