Reggio Emiliaਰੇਜੋ ਐਮੀਲੀਆ

Reggio Emilia, Reggio nell'Emilia in full, is a city of 172,921 people in Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, on the flat plain of the Po Valley along the ancient Via Aemilia. For Punjabis it is where organised Sikh life in Italy began: the country's first gurdwara opened in this province in 1991, published accounts describe Italy's oldest gurdwara as the one in Reggio Emilia, and the cattle farms and dairies around the city, where Parmigiano Reggiano is made, have been worked in large part by Punjabi Sikhs since the 1990s.

Where is Reggio Emilia, and why do Punjabis live there?

Reggio Emilia lies in the northeast of Italy, capital of its own province in the Emilia-Romagna region, on a plain crossed by the Crostolo stream. It began with the Via Aemilia, the Roman road built by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus in 187 BC, as the forum town of Regium Lepidi, and its old town still keeps the hexagonal shape of the ancient walls. The city holds a famous place in Italian identity: on 7 January 1797, in Reggio, the tricolour that became the Italian flag was first adopted. Today it is the fourth largest city in Emilia-Romagna, a prosperous provincial capital of food production, engineering and services.

Punjabis live in and around Reggio Emilia because the Po Valley plain around it is dairy country, and dairy country needed cow workers. From the 1980s and 1990s, as younger Italians left farm work, Punjabi farming families took the early morning work in the cattle sheds, work their own farming background had prepared them for, and chain migration filled the province's farm towns: Reggio itself, and Novellara, Correggio and Rio Saliceto to its north. Reggio Emilia opens this series' map of Punjabi places in Italy, and in community history it comes first.

What do the numbers say?

Italy keeps no census of religion or ethnicity, so every figure for Sikhs in Italy is an estimate, and this page treats them that way. The widely used estimates put Italy's Sikhs at about 50,000 in 2006, rising to an estimated 220,000 in 2023, the second largest Sikh population in Europe after the United Kingdom, spread across about 60 gurdwaras. For Novellara, the small town 18 kilometres north of Reggio, the estimate is 10,000 Sikhs. No sourced city level count for Reggio Emilia itself is published, so none is stated here: what is documented is the province's place in the story, as the site of Italy's first gurdwara and one of its oldest communities.

The dairy belt: bergamini and Parmigiano Reggiano

Starting in the 1990s, Indians, most of them Sikhs from Punjab, came to dominate the labour force of the Italian dairy industry. The Po Valley's climate is similar to Punjab's, and many of the workers came from farming families: their first jobs were directly with the cows, as bergamini, the traditional cow hands of the northern dairies, and some moved on to become cheesemakers, the better paid work. The production of Parmigiano Reggiano, the hard cheese named for Parma and Reggio, depends significantly on this immigrant labour, and Italy's most important farming union, Coldiretti, and civic authorities in the region acknowledge that the immigrants are indispensable to agriculture and the dairy industry. Reporting on the community has gone further, calling Sikhs the saviours of Parmesan, the workers who kept an industry alive as local young people left it.

Gurdwaras: Rio Saliceto, the city and Novellara

In 1991 the first gurdwara in Italy opened in an abandoned flour mill in Rio Saliceto, a small town in Reggio Emilia province, where worship took place on Sundays. The faith had older echoes here: Sikh soldiers fought in the Italian campaign of the Second World War, and at Forlì, elsewhere in Emilia-Romagna, a memorial inaugurated in 2011 honours the fallen, where the Commonwealth War Graves Commission estimates 352 Sikh soldiers died. In Reggio city itself stands the Gurdwara Singh Sabha, its arched canopy topped by a great Khanda, and published accounts describe the Reggio Emilia gurdwara as the oldest in Italy. Eighteen kilometres north, Novellara holds the second largest gurdwara in Europe, built by a community that works mainly in the cattle farms and dairies where Parmigiano Reggiano is made, in a town of just 13,301 people. Correggio, also in the province, has its own gurdwara too. Together they make this quiet Po Valley province the first home of Sikh Italy.

Reggio Emilia is the city of the first tricolour, a Roman road city on the Po plain, and for Punjabis the starting point of Italy's Sikh story: the first gurdwara, the dairy work that made the community indispensable, and Novellara's great temple up the road. For the full map, see Punjabi places in Italy.