page_title: Italian Chileans
section_title: Italian community
hierarchical_section_title: Italian Chileans / Italian community
caption_attribution_description: Español: La Familia chilena Alessandri en 1920.
context_page_description: Italian Chileans are Chileans of full or partly Italian descent. It is estimated that 150,000 at 600,000 Chileans are of full or partial Italian ancestry. In Southern Chile, there were state-conducted Italian immigrants programs though they were not as massive as the German and Croatian immigrants programs. Families settled especially in Capitán Pastene, Angol, Lumaco, and Temuco but also in Valparaiso, Concepción, Chillán, Valdivia, and Osorno. One of the notable Italian influences in Chile is, for example, the sizable number of Italian surnames of a proportion of Chilean politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals, many of whom intermarried into the "Castilian-Basque" elites.
  Italian Chileans, along with French Chileans, contributed to the development, cultivation and ownership of the world-famous Chilean wines from haciendas in the Central Valley, since the first wave of Italians arrived in colonial Chile in the early 19th century.
context_section_description: The Italian community has been present since the times of Giovanni Battista Pastene, who participated in the discovery of Chile to the Spanish crown in the shipment of Pedro de Valdivia.
  Since then, many Italians have occupied positions of importance and married with Chileans of Spanish origin who ruled Chile; for example, the wife of Salvador Allende, the Italian Chilean Hortensia Bussi.
  Former President Salvador Allende told the journalist Régis Debray that a Genovese shoemaker, Giovanni De Marchi, had a strong influence on its policy of training adolescents:
  Just finished classes went to speak to this anarchist who had a great deal of influence on my life as a boy. He was sixty, or perhaps sixty years, and would chat with me. I was taught to play chess, I spoke of things of political life, and I lent books.
  In the early 19th century, the patriarch of the Alessandri family, Giuseppe Pietro Alessandri Tarzo, came from Tuscany and worked as Consul of the Kingdom of Sardinia in Santiago. Among his descendants are two presidents of Chile, Arturo Alessandri (1920–1925 and 1932–1938) and Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964).
  Among the Italian-Chileans are architects (as Gioacchino Toeschi), painters (as Camilo Mori), industrial (as Anacleto Angelini), actresses (like Claudia Conserva), economists (as Vittorio Corbo) and statesmen (as the President Arturo Alessandri and his son).
  The Italian language is promoted by the Chilean section of Dante Alighieri, while the Italian press has with:
  La Gazzetta Italiana nel Cile, bimonthly (Santiago), director Nadir Moroso.
  Presenza, fortnightly (Providencia, 1969), publisher and editorial director Giuseppe Tommasi (Scalabrini Fathers).
  There are some Italian schools in Chile (including in Santiago, the "Vittorio Montiglio"  and Valparaíso, the "Arturo Dell'Oro" ) and some organizations protect and serve the Italian community.
caption: Family Alessandri in 1920, with two future presidents of Chile.
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