The land was not empty. For millennia the Kaingang people had lived on this plateau, and the first name the settlers' world gave the place reflected the careless prejudice of the era: Campo dos Bugres, a term for the indigenous inhabitants. Tropeiros - the cattle drovers of southern Brazil - had long passed through on their journeys, and Jesuit missionaries had tried and failed to establish reductions here. When the first Italians arrived in 1875, they were received in a simple wooden shed that gave the colonial seat its early nickname, Barracão, "the big shed." On April 11, 1877, the settlement was officially named Colônia Caxias, in honor of the Duke of Caxias. Within a year, some two thousand settlers had come.

The early years were brutal. The settlers carried primitive tools and farming techniques poorly suited to the local soil and climate. Until houses rose and crops came in, they survived by gathering, hunting, and selling felled timber. Survival depended on how many hands a household could put to work, so families grew large. They planted wheat, beans, and maize, raised chickens and pigs and cows, and slowly the colony found its feet. The land's gift turned out to be grapes. Vines took to the highland, and wine became the foundation of an economy that grew with startling speed. By 1881 the first agro-industrial fair displayed the colony's produce - the seed of what would become the Festa da Uva, the grape festival still held in Caxias today.

Then their own country turned against them. Under the nationalist policies of Getúlio Vargas, the Italian identity the settlers had nurtured was treated as a threat. Between 1941 and 1944, organized campaigns sought to erase the symbols of foreign ethnicity, and an atmosphere of fear settled over the colony. Italians and their descendants were forbidden to speak their dialect - many still struggled in Portuguese - and a wall of silence closed around them. Travel required safe-conduct passes. The Festa da Uva itself fell silent, suspended from 1938. People stopped passing down their language and stories even at home, afraid of what remembering might cost. Only after the Second World War did the pressure ease, and reconciliation came slowly in the 1950s, by which time much had already been lost.

What rose from those hardships is one of Brazil's most dynamic economies. Caxias grew from 54,000 people in 1950 to well over 460,000 today, its industry shifting from village blacksmiths to giants of metalworking and transportation - Marcopolo, which builds more than half the bus bodies made in the country, and the truck and trailer conglomerate Randon among them. Wealth was built not only on machinery but on trust, the dense bonds of a community that had survived together. The old rural traditions endure in the countryside: the filó, where families gather in kitchens and wine cellars over salami and wine, cards and old songs of a homeland their grandparents left. In 2019 the city recognized Talian, the immigrants' dialect once forbidden, as part of its cultural heritage - a quiet repair of an old wound.