Italians in Romania

In the 13th century the Republic of Genoa, always looking for new routes and tempting merchandise, creates many colonies and commercial and military ports in the northern Black Sea and along the coast around the mouth of the Danube, settlements useful to protect commercial maritime routes.

Among the major settlements there can be mentioned Moncastro (Cetatea Albă - Basarabia), Licostomo (Chilia Veche), Caladda (Galați), Constanța, Saint George (Giurgiu), Calafat, Vicina (Isaccea) and another Saint George (Sfântu Gheorghe). The origin of the names of these colonies can be obvious as San Giorgio, one of the historical saints of Genoa. Less known is the etymology of Calafat, place where they worked many caulkers, skilled workers employed in shipbuilding and in the nautical maintenance, caulkers or employees specialized to make waterproof the hull of a ship smearing it with wood tar.

Attract by easy gains and following the Republic’s ships that already dominated the Black Sea, the Genoese and their families came to constitute perhaps 10% of the population in the coastal Romanian population in the 13th and 14th. Everything finished with the arrival of the Turks; part of the survivors returned in Liguria, the others remained in the Dobruja (Dobrogea).

Another important migratory flow directed from Italy to Romania, this time laborers looking for work, happened since the first half of the 19th century, when it is estimated that about 130,000 Italians moved to Romania, most of them coming from Emilia Romagna, from Friuli and Veneto. The first departures apparently date back to 1821, when some families of the Val di Fassa and Val di Fiemme (Trentino) are conducted in the Apuseni Mountains in Transylvania, to work as lumberjack and wood workers on behalf of an Austrian timber trader.

In 1900 a large Italian community settled in Piatra Neamt, workers engaged in the railways construction, mining and construction. We recall the masterpieces, funerary monuments, which have been built for the noble families of Romania in the "Bellu" cemetery of Bucharest and the "Eternity" of Iasi.

At the time it was drafted a Royal Handbook (1910) for the Italian immigrant who moved to the Balkans and Romania. The Handbook was useful and important to know the paperwork that allowed the access to Romania for work purposes. The Royal Commissioner of Emigration, editor of the Handbook, recommended in the preface to follow all the procedures for avoiding sending them back to Italy. Nearly 100 years after, Italy asked the Romanian immigrants virtually the same bureaucratic procedures for their entry into the Italian labor market.

After the fall of Communism, the small Italian-Romanian remained community was recognized by the Romanian Government, through the "Status" of linguistic minority.

Arriving in the early '90s: there is no more labor but business flow. Low labor costs (10 times smaller than in Italy), important tax breaks and easy entry, lead the first Italian companies specialized mainly in the textile, clothing and footwear on the Romanian market.

In 2012, from a total of more than 176,000 companies in Romania, 30,802 were Italian companies (17.5%) and contributed with 5% to the GDP in Romania and in terms of employment offered more than 800 thousand jobs, about 10% of the active working population.

Nowadays. In a recent television report of a famous Italian broadcaster, is interviewed an Italian who works in a factory in Romania. "I'm 53 years old," he says, "and who assumes me in Italy at this age? Here I found a job and a new life. " Ebbs and flows.