The Circular Routes of Colonial and Postcolonial Domestic Work: Però’s and Ciaravino’s Alexandria and Ghermandi’s “The Story of Woizero Bekelech and Signor Antonio”

The chapter explores the connection between emigration and immigration through a combined reading of texts where demographic movements are defined by colonial routes: Renata Ciaravino’s script for the 2005 play Alexandria directed by Franco Però about adventurous women from the Friuli region who emigrated to Egypt in the 1920s to work as wet nurses and maids anticipates the silent yet profoundly important role of today’s domestic helpers and caretakers in Italy as portrayed by Gabriella Ghermandi’s colonial/post-colonial “The Story of Woizero Bekelech and Signor Antonio,” included in her 2007 novel Regina di fiori e di perle. The two texts highlight the forms of emancipation that women migrants develop as part of relocations abroad as well as the forms of awareness about colonial power relations that they prompt among locals.

Crossing the Atlantic to Meet the Nation: The Emigration Ship in Mignonette’s Songs and Crialese’s Nuovomondo

The topic of voyages is explored in this first chapter through visual and oral materials in which the emigrants’ regional affiliations espouse an in-progress national formation project during trans-national travels toward “America,” at once a real and imaginary place. Songs made popular by the Queen of the Emigrants, the diva-singer Gilda Mignonette who mixed a traditional Neapolitan repertoire with dramatic songs on emigration and colonial anthems, are read next to Emanuele Crialese’s film Nuovomondo (Golden Door 2006), which foregrounds the role of the ship for the leaving, traveling, and arriving migrants at the turn of the century. In these texts, the pre-occupied space under discussion is the ship, a floating social microcosm in which national fractures and international dreams co-exist on a simultaneously dividing and uniting ocean. The preoccupation over the condition of the emigrants that the ship hosts prompts different reactions in these authors, in turn defining different perceptions and figurations of emigration and consequently a different map of the Italian nation’s formation.

Writing the Pasta Factory and the Boardinghouse as Transnational Homes: Public and Private Acts in Melliti’s Pantanella and Mazzucco’s Vita

Chapter 4 offers a joint reading of Mohsen Melliti’s 1992 novel Pantanella: Canto lungo la strada and Melania Mazzucco’s 2003 novel Vita. It examines two immigrant spaces related to actual historical events: an abandoned pasta factory occupied by immigrants in Rome and a tenement building located in New York’s Little Italy. The chapter switches from the 1990s to the early 1900s, yet stays focused on the dynamics of tension and cooperation among immigrants living in desperate conditions. The use of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space on “habiting and use” highlights the unique combination of domestic and economic activities taking place in a residential space inhabited by immigrants (sleeping, eating, selling, exchanging, producing). In intertwining echoes of the three experiences of emigration, immigration, and colonialism, these texts show how the intimate and yet transnational space of immigrant living places preoccupies the local governments for safety and health reasons. Yet, at the same time, these spaces create unique occasions for invention out of the need for immigrants to remember and survive in a new environment.

A Multicultural Project in a National Square: The Orchestra of Piazza Vittorio

Part II (Houses) is a cultural mapping of the spaces where immigrants live/d, that is, residential buildings that have been or are intrinsically linked to the migration experiences from/to Italy as well as so-called ethnic neighborhoods. The Aperture that opens this part focuses on an area of Rome, Piazza Vittorio, which has come to represent the immigrant hub of the capital. It explores the square—a quintessential Italian space—both for its role in nation building and for its several layers of immigrant occupation. Through the analysis of Agostino Ferrente’s 2006 documusical The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, which recounts the creative project of forming a multi-ethnic orchestra in this piazza, the chapter highlights an interesting example of how preoccupations over the presence of immigrants can be substituted by new visions. In an area where the very meaning of “ethnic neighborhood” can be mapped at a trans-national level (multi-multi-ethnic) given the diversity of the immigrants’ origin, Ferrente’s documusical reflects a post-national scenario of cultural co-existence within an ethical vision that interestingly offers, especially in its final climax, a “success” story.

An Osean of Pre-Occupation and Possibilities: L’orda

Part I (Waters) focuses on the liquid space of sea and ocean waters as quintessential migration spaces. It interconnects emigration from Italy and immigration to Italy by linking these waters in the portmanteau of the title and its characterization as a pre-occupied space. The texts addressed in this Aperture as well as the two chapters it introduces contain stories of the perilous voyages and shipwrecks that have silently punctuated the over-150-year-long history of Italian emigration and that are used here as a platform to re-read Italian history at large, especially in light of the current arrivals of immigrants from all over the world. The Aperture revolves around L’orda (The Horde), the best-selling book by Gian Antonio Stella adapted to the stage with the Compagnia delle Acque, which provides an ideal opportunity to bring attention to the tragic nature of migrant voyages, yesterday as well as today. In the Atlantic and Mediterranean waters, one can discern a thick tapestry of forced and chosen migratory routes, and the cultural connections that they have woven over the centuries. The Mediterranean is the prologue to the transatlantic voyage for the Italian emigrants, while the Atlantic Ocean remains an echo or a possibility in almost all the texts analyzed in Part I.

Edification between Nation and Migration in Cavanna’s Les Ritals and Adascalitei’s “Il giorno di San Nicola”

This chapter shows how the current exploitation of foreign immigrant workers in the construction sector in Italy today is not dissimilar from the experiences that Italian emigrants encountered some years ago: Mariana Adascalitei’s Romanian protagonists in her yet unpublished novella “Il giorno di San Nicola” are quite reminiscent of François Cavanna’s Italian bricklayers in France, as recounted in his 1978 novel Les Ritals.The chapter investigates the tension at work between ambitions of personal improvement and the dangers and invisibility intrinsic to construction sites, one of the most common workplaces for Italian male immigrants abroad in the past and for foreign male immigrants in Italy today.

All at One Point: The Unlikely Connections between Italy’s Emigration, Immigration, and (Post)Colonialism

The introduction opens with a reading of Italo Calvino’s poignant short story “All at One Point.” It relies on statistical data, sociological studies, and historical facts to address the connections between emigration from Italy and immigration to Italy, as well as Italian colonialism in Africa and the Mediterranean, and its postcolonial legacy. This intersection prompts a re-mapping of the Italian nation and poses Italy as a unique laboratory to rethink national belonging at large in our era of massive demographic mobility. The introduction explains the application of theories of space by de Certeau, Lefebvre, and Soja to the trans-national dimension of the Italian nation and highlights the main goals of the book. The introduction offers a fairly comprehensive survey of the fields that the book is in dialogue with by positioning itself vis-à-vis previous publications and also functions as an overview. It highlights the double approach of the book which is, on one hand to focus on texts that address both emigration and immigration or colonialism in conjunction; and, on the other, to connect texts that can be fruitfully read in tandem in order to create historical and cultural reverberations.

Italy as a Laboratory for Imagi-Nation: The Citizenship Law between Inbound and Outbound Flows

The Conclusion discusses a thorny and pressing issue in Italy: the reform of the citizenship law (n. 91) toward the inclusion of a mild jus soli that would recognize the presence of hundreds of thousands of young people who were born from immigrant parents and who have no access to citizenship until the age of 18, if not later. Three projects are the focus of this conclusion: Maria Rosa Jijon’s short video Forte e Chiaro, Fred Kuwornu’s documentary 18 Ius Soli, and the educational project “Cultural-Shock.” While all advocating for the so-called second generation, these projects adopt different styles and ideological approaches, reflecting the tension between assimilation, integration, and intercultural questioning. In attempting to define Italy as a potentially unique laboratory in matters of migration, perhaps conducive to Franco Cassano’s “imagi-nation,” the conclusion proposes to read current immigration through the experience of past migrations and colonial legacies, painful and contradictory though they may be. In lieu of sterile or nostalgic forms of national identity spurred by territorial defense and economic insecurity, Italy has the potential to use its trans-national archive to re-map its present scenario of multi-cultural social relationships.

Labor on the Move: Rodari’s Construction Workers and Kuruvilla’s Babysitter

Part III (Workplaces) shifts attention to the theme of occupation in terms of working in a space and re-maps Italy along the routes of its outbound and inbound migrations. Of all the numerous job sectors related to Italian emigration abroad and foreign immigrants in Italy, two are chosen for their specific relevance in the historical and contemporary scenario: construction labor and domestic help. The Aperture introduces the topic through texts that focus on bricklayers (Gianni Rodari’s nursery rhymes from Favole al telefono) and baby-sitters (Gabriella Kuruvilla’s children’s story Questa non è una baby-sitter). The apparently light tone of these texts written for a young readership conceals a very subtle discussion of the abusive work conditions and prejudices that migrants face on construction sites and in domestic environments, and to which they react thanks to their ability to endure and question.

Displaced Italies and Immigrant “Delinquent” Spaces in Pariani’s Argentinian Conventillos and Lakhous’s Roman Palazzo

In addressing residential spaces through the lens of de Certeau’s concept of “delinquent space,” that is, a space that creatively defies social norms and stereotypes, Chapter 3 looks at the conventillos as described by Laura Pariani in her novel Dio non ama i bambini (2007) and at a residential building (palazzo) inhabited by locals and immigrants in the same Vittorio Square, as depicted by Amara Lakhous in his novel Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio (2006). Despite the different locations of these buildings and the different time periods of the stories (turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires versus contemporary Rome), the two novels successfully render the challenges and possibilities presented by the co-existence of people from different backgrounds. In part for their captivating employment of the detective genre, in part for their innovative narrative structure, the novels suggest the need to investigate immigrant societies with new questions in order to find new answers that challenge the norm.