Boca is a small and beautiful town, welcoming, immersed in the green of the hills, with a beautiful climate, and streets and houses well cared-for. Why then did so many of our grandparents, a century ago, go away so often and so far, to bild themselves a life ?
Well, Boca was not the town that we know now. The photographs and the stories of our elders testify to this. The life was particulariy hard, the families were numerous, and there was little land to cultivate. Yet only from working on the land did one gain that little which served the minimum support for the family.
Tha character of the inhabitants of Boca, like all from Piemontese, was hard-working, but the children were always so numerous that the work of the head of the family was not enough for everyone. And so they searched for another way out for themselves. Above all, the one who had learned a job for being able to work abroad more easily was favored.
The jobs that were betterknow and practical in Boca were those of a cook, joiner and a bricklayer. Thans to these jobs, many members of the Valdrini, Rovarino and Del Boca families emigrated.
Moreover the two families were already tightly intertwined between their cross-marriages and the ties in relationships, they increased the generations. The place to which to emigrate depended on the stories of friends, according to the major possibilities of finding work: France, Switzerland or America. But the information that arrived at Boca was very poor a century ago !
It was not important if one left the town, knowing only one language, the dialect of Boca. How often one did not know French or English. The only security, on which the emigrant could count, was the network of cousins or fellow countrymen scattered almost everywhere abroad. The one who abandoned Boca, with courage unimmaginable today, was strong with this only resort !
It was not important either that the lourneys were long and complicated. The strength of survival brought these people on dangerous boats and trains, where they immediately encountered people like them that brought with themselves only their youth and desire to work, it did not matter where. They dreamed of a return home in less poor conditions, to assure the family a minimum of support.