Before the Italians arrived, the place was a rest stop. In 1832, a hamlet called Várzea Grande - Great Lowland - appeared on colonial maps along the old bandeirante routes, the paths worn by 17th-century Portuguese-Brazilian expeditions hunting gold, enslaving indigenous people, and scouting the interior for the crown. The name Vargem, a regional variant of Várzea, came to describe the broad open lowland where the town took root. In 1888 a district called Vargem Grande was carved out of the neighboring municipality of São João da Boa Vista. In 1922 it became an independent municipality. In 1944, to distinguish it from other Vargem Grandes scattered across Brazil, it acquired its current name - Vargem Grande do Sul, Southern Great Lowland. The town sits at 721 meters elevation in what Brazilians call the Mogiana region, a coffee-producing zone that once supplied European markets and now mostly supplies domestic demand.

Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 - later than any other country in the Americas. Across the São Paulo coffee belt, plantation owners who had depended on enslaved African labor suddenly faced a different world. Some tried to pay the newly freed workers almost nothing; many of them left. The provincial government, urged on by coffee barons, subsidized European immigration on a massive scale. Italians came by the hundreds of thousands, then millions, crossing the Atlantic in steerage and taking up the pick and hoe on farms that had, weeks earlier, been worked by enslaved people. Vargem Grande do Sul filled with Italian families whose surnames still dominate the municipal registry: Baizi, Bassi, Beloni, Bortoloto, Buzato, Canal, Coracini, Cossi, Filipini, Longuini, Lupetti, Marquesini, Menossi, Molinari, Nardini, Pratali, Pecinato, Rocchetto, Sartori, Sbardelini. They founded mutual-aid societies because they had to - the state provided little. They held dinners and dances at the Società's hall. Some of those traditions continue.

Coffee once dominated the countryside around Vargem Grande do Sul, but the crop has largely moved on. What you see now, driving out of town along SP-344 or SP-215, is potato fields - Brazil's largest potato-producing state is São Paulo, and this stretch of the Mogiana contributes significantly to that output. The rivers Jaguari-Mirim, Verde, and Fartura thread through the municipal territory, and temperatures swing from warm summers to dry winters - good weather for tubers. The municipality today counts about 43,000 people on 267 square kilometers, and the Human Development Index of 0.802 places it in the upper tier of Brazilian towns. Linguist Amadeu Amaral in 1976 classified the local speech as a variation of Caipira, the rural dialect of interior São Paulo and southern Minas Gerais - a mix of Portuguese with heavy indigenous and, here, Italian influence. It is the sound of a place where three cultures ground themselves into one over four generations.

Italian immigration brought Catholicism of a particular intensity - the village-saint, procession-and-feast variety, more Mediterranean than Lusitanian - and the religious life of Vargem Grande do Sul still reflects it. The Paróquia Sant'Ana, founded in 1891 by Dom Lino Deodato Rodrigues de Carvalho, ranks as the tenth-largest parish in the Diocese of São João da Boa Vista. Saint Anne, grandmother of Jesus in Catholic tradition, has long been a favored patroness of Italian-Brazilian communities; her feast day on July 26 still brings the town out for processions, music, and food. The Società de Mutuo Socorso-turned-Sociedade Beneficente Brasileira keeps its schedule of dinners and dances. The families whose names fill the ledgers still bury their dead in the same cemetery, still attend the same parish, still argue about whether a slice of bread is a fetta or a pedaço. Eighty years after the wartime decree, the answer is: depends on who you ask.