espite the overwhelming presence of southerners, almost all of Italy's substantial linguistic diversity has at one time or another been represented in the New York City area. Northern Italians, especially Ligurians from Chiavari south of Genoa, but also those from Piedmont and Tuscany, were numerous among the earlier arrivals in the mid-19th century, but there also appears to have been a variety of other northerners. Relatively little is known about the trajectory of the smaller northern Italian communities, which seem to have started moving out of Little Italy already in the 1880s towards the southern section of Greenwich Village, where many worked as artisans and assimilated relatively rapidly.