Micro-historians have acquainted us with the unique heuristic value of agent-based perspectives to conceive past experiences and opportunities and better understand the social, institutional, cultural and political world in which men and women of the past were embedded. But what should historians do, when in their research they encounter dozens of individuals who left too little evidence to sustain a paper, let alone a book, but whose stories present some common features? Luca Codignola decided to collect the traces left by those who crossed the Atlantic and connected the Italian peninsula with North America before the nineteenth-century mass migration. He shows that many of these people had a truly multinational profile, blurring their identification as ‘Italians’ (a notion which is itself highly problematic before the Risorgimento), but also as ‘Americans’. Codignola rightly stresses that merchants and clergymen, who constituted most of these travellers, belonged to international networks and circulated so much that their origin meant little and their ‘national’ belonging and feelings far from constituted a fixed identity. In addition, these different networks tended to overlap. For instance, scientists and botanists often belonged to the clergy and relied on merchants to send and collect specimens. In turn the merchants traded in religious paraphernalia. Mobility, rather than ‘nationality’ or any sort of unique professional label, is thus the common denominator of many of these ‘cultural brokers’ travelling between the Italian peninsula and North America.

The introductory chapter explains at length the author's distance from the historians of the so-called ‘Contribution School’, who wished to stress the positive Italian influence on North America and to record all ‘Italian’ migrants. Not only is such a goal unachievable according to Codignola, but the very notion of ‘Italianness’ is problematic given the multiplicity of networks to which most of these early migrants belonged. He also contests the approach of the ‘Enlightenment School’, which focused on the circulation of ideas between the two areas and overlooked the numeric importance of the hundreds, or possibly thousands, of individuals who circulated between the two areas from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 to the mid-nineteenth century (the sense of ‘1846’ in the book title is unclear and the titles of two chapters state 1847 and 1848 as the end-date).

The rest of the volume retraces information on these early non-illustrious migrants and travellers with all the honesty of a professional historian who never confuses plausible hypothesis with evidence, frustrating as the lack of evidence may be. The book is structured around the Italian cities where the migrants and travellers were born, lived or moved to. It starts with the earliest evidence in the two ports of Livorno and Genoa (chapter 1) and moves thereafter to Italian capitals and other ports (Naples, Turin, Trieste, Venice and Milan, chapter 2). Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Rome, the centre of significant transnational circulations of students, priests and travellers. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the mercantile connections of the Filicchi brothers of Livorno, who were entangled in trans-Atlantic religious and scientific networks. Chapter 7 reconstructs the extraordinary career of Angelo Inglesi, a scoundrel who pretended to be of noble Roman origin and managed to convince Bishop Dubourg in Louisiana to suggest him as his coadjutor, before travelling extensively in Europe to collect (and partially divert for personal use) significant sums for the Louisiana missions.

As a specialist in Catholic history, Codignola's chapters on Rome are particularly interesting. His knowledge of the intricacies of the Roman Curia allows him to perfectly contextualise and explain the overlapping networks of influence determining the arrival and destinations of young students and priests. He also describes the Church's efficient network for collecting information on North America. The chapters on Filicchi are equally convincing. Codignola was able to access private family archives, which, although incomplete, offer an innovative glimpse of these merchants who travelled across the Atlantic and traded cod and religious paraphernalia.

The extensive index (p. 447–519), which consists largely of names, is evidence of the hundreds of individuals that Codignola came across in his research. He insists that his book ‘is not a catalogue of “early Italians” or “early Americans” involved in North Atlantic exchanges’ (p. 51), but rather an illustration of the existence of early networks between the two continents. The reader might, however, get a little lost in the dozens of subsequent profiles of early migrants on which information is particularly scant, especially in the first two chapters. The end section of each chapter, clearly assessing its main contribution, is thus particularly welcome.

The book is the result of decades-long, hard archival digging in 46 archival depositories situated in nine different countries, and of careful recourse to an impressive bibliography (pp. 389–445). Endnotes contain not only references, but plenty of additional information (pp. 227–386). Further evidence is to be found in nine online tables (listed p. 225), totalling 64 pages. These tables list hundreds of ships sailing between North America and the Italian peninsula, despite the author's pessimism about the possibility of reconstructing shipping (p. 217). The decision of Toronto University Press not to include tables in the book itself is reasonable, given its size, but ultimately reflects the extreme difficulty in dealing with such a mass of information. A final ‘cold’ check of the manuscript would have helped to ease the reading. The text contains frequent repetitions and the author often resorts to brackets. Explanations sometimes come too late for a non-specialist, e.g., the ‘trustee controversy’ is mentioned on pp. 103, 112–114, 118–119, 121–123, 158, but not explained until p. 206. Some maps, for instance to visualise circulation of selected agents, would also have been useful.

Codignola's book sheds light on the early phase of the circulation of people, goods and ideas between the Italian peninsula and North America. His extensive research makes him an undisputed expert on this topic and the book will provide an unrivalled reference for all those who seek information on these early cultural encounters. The non-illustrious men and women that Codignola familiarises us with not only contributed to the mutual representations of the other continent, but also concretely connected the worlds they lived in and shaped the networks that sustained them.