Ancestral Home - Pertusio, Italy

Giacomo Riva is listed on his 1896 army discharge paper as being from the town of Pertusio, Italy. Italy is a Southern European country in the shape of a boot that extends
out into the Mediterranean Sea. It's divided into twenty regions and Pertusio can be found in the Piedmont Region which is located in the north-west part of the country. Piedmont is surrounded on three sides by the Alps Mountains and it borders with France and Switzerland.

The Piedmont Region (illustrated in red to the left) is divided into eight provinces and one of those provinces is called Torino. Its territory is mostly high mountains and its capital city is Turin. It's within the province of Torino that the town of Pertusio can be found.

The first known humans to inhabit Torino were Celtics tribes (200BC) who lived there until they where replaced by expansion from the Roman Empire coming northward. By the first century the area was a Roman settlement. During Renaissance Time the French army under Napoleon occupied the area followed by the Austrians who ruled until 1861. The 18th and 19th centuries in Italy were often unstable and violent.

It's important to our family history to note that Pertusio has two hamlets near by---one called "Case Riva" and the other "Case Faletto." Hamlets, I'm told by people who live in the area, took their names from the people living there. So it's safe to assume that the Riva side of Giacomo's family (his father's ancestors) and the Faletto side (his mother's ancestors) are well entrenched in these hamlets. It was from this area of Italy that twenty-three year old Giacomo Riva set off across France to the port at LeHavre where he got on a steamer ship named the LaBourgne. Seven to eight days later he had crossed the Atlantic Ocean, arriving at Ellis Island, New York City, on January 18, 1897. (See his passenger listing here.)

© J. Riva 2008


Ellis Island

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Coming to America!

My grandfather Giacomo---James in English---Riva left his home in Pertusio, Italy (in the province of Torino) when he was twenty-three years old. He became part of the surge of European immigrants that processed through Ellis Island, forming what historians later dubbed the era of the Great Melting Pot. The passengers' list from the steamer ship the LaBourgne places his arrival in New York City on January 18, 1897. He boarded the ship at LeHavre, France, which was a common departure port for immigrants from the northern mountainous border region of Italy. According to the ship's passenger list his destination was Spring Valley, Illinois.

As a side note, the LaBourgne was built by Chantliers de le Mediterranee in 1886. It was 7,395 tons, 495 feet long and 52 feet wide. Service speed was 17.5 knots. The ship could hold 500 passengers and 200 crew members. It flew a French flag and serviced a line between LeHavre and New York until it sunk following a collision off Newfoundland. 549 lives were lost on July 4, 1898---that was approximately six months after Giacomo Riva hopped on that steamer to come to America.

For more information on this ship, check the New York Times where many LaBourgne articles are archived, and also see this link for a thumbnail on the steamer.



Giacomo came to the United States eleven-and-a-half years after the Statue of Liberty was dedicated. The hundred-and-fifty-one foot copper structure impressed him so much that, according to oral history, he spoke about it often. When I was a teenager in the 1950s my family went to New York City and I'll never forget how disappointed my dad (Peter Riva) was at the sight of raw garbage floating in the statue's harbor and at the tarnished-green color of Miss. Liberty.

"I wish I'd never sent it," he said. "I wish I'd never seen it!" Dad had expected to find the same pristine statue that had greeted the LaBourgne, the welcoming statue that Giacomo Riva loved and respected his entire life as a symbol of freedom.

This would be a good point to mention that Giacomo became a nationalized citizen on October 29, 1898 at the Marshall County Court in Illinois. View the document here. We may never know why exactly he was headed towards Spring Valley, Illinois (Bureau County) but we do know it was a booming coal mining region at the time and it's a good guess that he already had relatives living there who told him a job would be easy to get. Recruiters, back then, used to go to New York to bring back immigrants to work in the state's coal mines which ended up to be his life's work.

© J.E. Riva 2008


Inspection Room, Ellis Island


(Data on Giacomo above found on an Ellis Island passenger list.)

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Italian Army Discharge for Giacomo Riva 1896

Front side (click to enlarge)



Back side (click to enlarge)


Thanks to the posters at Italian Genealogy who translated this document we found out it reveals the following information:

Giacomo Riva was birth date on March 26, 1873

His parents were Giovanni Riva and Margherita Faletto

He was born in Pertusio, Italy, a town in the province of Torino. (Torino is one of eight provinces in the region of Piedmont. Also, in Pertusio there are hamlets called "Case Riva" and "Case Faletto." Hamlets, I'm told, took their names from the people living there.)

Physical description: Height: 5 feet and some inches---there's is a hole in the paper so it's not clear. His hair and eyebrow we listed as chestnut. His eyes were Grey. Forehead: low. Nose: Grecian. Completion: Rosy. Teeth: healthy. He had a distinguishing mark listed as a mole on his chin.

He was assigned to the 4th Alpini Regiment at the Italian colony in Eritrea (Africa)

He was a bread maker

Discharge date: ?/?/1896

NOTE: Giacomo/James Riva carried this document, his nationalization paper (below) and his miner's certification around in a small leather pouch.

© J. E. Riva 2008

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