Gualdo Tadino is a small town of just under 15,000 inhabitants in central Italy, in the Umbria region, just under 50km from Perugia.
Within this town, there is a district with several street names that are very familiar to locals in Luxembourg and the Greater Region: Via Dudelange, Via Esch-sur-Alzette, Via Lussemburgo, Via Villerupt, Via Audun-le-Tiche, Via Metz and Via Strasburgo.
How did the two towns in the south of the Grand Duchy end up giving their names to streets in a place almost 1,300 km further south?
History of immigration to Luxembourg
Of the towns mentioned above, only Audun-le-Tiche is twinned with Gualdo Tadino. The Moselle municipality has been marked by a wave of Italian immigration which contributed to the supply of labour in the industrial sector. The two towns have been twinned since 1979, and tradition dictates that a road or street in a municipality is named after another commune with which it is partnered.
The municipality of Gualdo Tadino explained to Virgule that a committee met back in 2000 to discuss assigning street names. “These towns were chosen because they received a lot of emigration from Gualdo Tadino, and so there was a desire to pay tribute to our fellow citizens who settled there,” said Salvatore Zenobi, the municipality’s office manager.
In October 2018, the municipality of Gualdo Tadino shared a documentary on its social networks in which journalist Erika Mariniello visited the town’s Emigration Museum. The museum’s director, Catia Monacelli, recounts that “from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 1970s, millions of Italians left the country, including residents of Umbria”, in search of a better future.
These residents of Umbria left for “France, Belgium and Luxembourg”, according to Monacelli. There, they had “very difficult jobs”, particularly in the iron and coal mines, industries which were particularly prosperous in southern Luxembourg at the time.
Differdange’s Italian links
As explained above, a twinning arrangement between two towns can result in a road being named after the other town with which it is twinned.
A “Via Differdange” can also be found in Fiuminata, a town of 1,500 inhabitants located 40 km by car to the southeast of Gualdo Tadino, in the Marche region.
In Differdange, meanwhile, a “Rue de Fiuminata” can be found in Oberkorn, along with a sign indicating the distance separating the municipality from the other towns with which it is twinned. It points in several directions, including Fiuminata, which is 1,196 km from Luxembourg’s third-largest town.
The “Via Differdange”, in Fiuminata, in the Marche region. © Photo credit: Screenshot of Google Street View
Commemorations in Esch
The strong links between Gualdo Tadino and the mining areas of the Greater Region were commemorated in an exhibition inaugurated in Esch in 2021. It retraced the history of several Italian immigrants who fought against Nazism and fascism, as well as their descendants.
In 2019, Esch-sur-Alzette and Gualdo Tadino celebrated their first official relations, with a joint event in tribute to René Pascucci, a former Luxembourg footballer and captain of the Jeunesse d’Esch team, who died in 2018, whose family was originally from the Italian town.
Another footballer, who also captained Jeunesse d’Esch, can trace his roots back to Gualdo Tadino: Jean-Pierre Barboni, born in Esch-sur-Alzette in 1958. His ancestors were commemorated in the exhibition organised in Luxembourg’s second city in 2021.
(This article was originally published by Virgule. Machine translated, with editing and adaptation by John Monaghan.)