Environments of Italianness: for an environmental history of Italian migrations

Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

The battle for influence: Commemoration of transnational martyrs in the Italian diaspora of the U.S. under fascism

This article analyses the role commemoration of Fascist and anti-fascist martyrs played in the battle for political influence in the Italian diaspora of the United States during Mussolini’s early rule. It is structured around two case studies: the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, killed in Rome in 1924, and Giuseppe Carisi and Michele Ambrosoli, two Blackshirts killed in the Bronx on their way to the Memorial Day parade of 1927 in New York. Through an examination of sites of memory and commemoration ceremonies held in both Italy and the U.S., it adds a transnational element to the study of the role of secular martyrdom in the construction of collective identity, concluding that the transnational exchange evident in commemoration of both case studies added to the propagandistic power of the martyrological narrative by drawing meaning from geographical distance from Italy.

Transcultural Italies

The history of Italians and of modern Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration: between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century 27 million Italians migrated, and 60 to 80 million people worldwide now see their identity as connected with the Italian diaspora. Since the time of Italian unification a series of narratives about mobility has been produced both inside and outside the boundaries of Italy by agents such as the Italian state, international organizations, and migrant communities themselves. The essays in Transcultural Italies interrogate the inherently dynamic nature of Italian identity and culture. They do so by focusing on the key concepts and practices of mobility, memory, and translation. The essays represent a contrapuntal series of case studies that together offer a fresh perspective on the study of modern and contemporary Italy. The aim of the volume is to advance the transnational turn that is presently reshaping the field of Italian Studies and Modern Languages. The essays in the volume explore the meanings that ‘transnational’ and ‘transcultural’ assume when applied to the notion of Italian culture.

Race, technological modernity, and the Italo-Australian condition: Francesco De Pinedo's 1925 flight from Europe to Australia

Writing about fascism and aviation has stressed the role technology played in Mussolini's ambitions to cultivate fascist ideals in Italy and amongst the Italian diaspora. In this article we examine Francesco De Pinedo's account of the Australian section of his record-breaking 1925 flight from Rome to Tokyo. Our analysis of De Pinedo's reception as a modern Italian in a British Australia, and his response to that reception, suggests that this Italian aviator was relatively unconcerned with promoting Fascist greatness in Australia. De Pinedo was interested in Australian claims to the forms of modernity he had witnessed in the United States and which the Fascists were attempting to incorporate into a new vision of Italian destiny. Flight provided him with a geographical imagination which understood modernity as an international exchange of progressive peoples. His Australian reception revealed a nation anxious about preserving its British identity in a globalising world conducive to a more cosmopolitan model of modernity.

Local History or New Dimensions in Croatian-Italian Relations? A Review of a Book by F. Škiljan “Italians in Zagreb” [Škiljan F. Talijani u Zagrebu. Zagreb: Zajednica Talijana u Zagrebu, 2015. 95, 101 s.]

This review is dedicated to the monograph by Filip Škiljan, а Researcher from the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies (Zagreb), whose area of interest includes the position of ethnic minorities in contemporary Croatia. The book is an extremely detailed and scrupulous piece of research on the origins and history of the Italian community in Zagreb from the 12th Century to the present day. A significant part of the work is devoted to the results of field research conducted by the author, including interviews with different representatives of the Italian diaspora. As a result, this work creates a very comprehensive picture of the Italian presence in Zagreb with a broad historical perspective, which makes it a great contribution to the question of the position of the Italian minority in Croatia as a whole. It is worth emphasizing that this work is not free from different theoretical and methodological limitations which reveal a great deal about the historical and national psychology of Croatia. In this respect, it is quite interesting to look in particular at the chapter devoted to the Middle Ages regarding the methods, evaluations, and approaches used by author. According to F. Škiljan the Ottoman conquest of the Balkan peninsula led to the divide between Croatia and the Italian (and, consequently, European) civilizational space, which had a serious impact on Croatian identity.

The encounter between Italy and Siam at the dawn of the twentieth century: Italian artists and architects in the modernising Kingdom of Siam

This paper focuses on the encounters between Italy and Siam at the dawn of the twentieth century, as it was the most dynamic period of Italian settlement in the modernising Siam. The paper analyses the development of Siamese modernisation as a challenging opportunity for Italian entrepreneurs and professionals, thanks to a healthy diplomatic relation between the two countries. Compared to the main characteristics of the Italian diaspora, the Italian colony in Siam stands out because of the fruits of its creative production. Siam was described as a symbol of tradition, not very different from the way China was often viewed, while the West was regarded as a source of modernity. With this perspective, the fact that Siam herself initiated the modernisation process, as well as the recruitment of Italians as part of the government's team in public works, architectural construction and civil engineering, was emphasised less than the part played by Italians in transforming the image of the Siamese capital. The paper examines how the encounters between Italy and Siam developed, attempting to do this from both Siamese and Italian perspectives, since both shared cultural memories, empirical evidence of cultural encounters and transculturality.

A Life in Absence

Chapter 8 tells the story of Mario Pieri (1776–1852) and of certain other Ionian and Greco-Italian diaspora intellectuals with whom he was connected. Drawing both from his unpublished diary and his published autobiography, and by following Pieri’s steps from Russian-controlled Corfu to Napoleonic and Habsburg Padua, Treviso, and Venice, and from there to Restoration Florence and back to British-controlled Corfu, it explores the way this ex-Venetian subject and transnational patriot came to see himself as a diaspora Greek through his involvement in Italian, and more specifically Tuscan philhellenism. The chapter thus hopes to tell something about the perceptions of the war from a position far removed from the theatre of battle, as well as of the impact that the Greek revolution and the European philhellenisms had on the peoples of the ‘Greek diasporas’, reshaping even the very meaning of this notion.

Global Tarantella

This book ventures into the history, global circulation, and recontextualization of tarantella, a genre of Southern Italian folk music and dance; in particular, it explores this phenomenon by observing local and national music and dance festivals and international dance performances and workshops, as well as by analyzing the contemporary production of new tarantella music text. Examining tarantella's changing image and role among Italians and Italian Americans, the book illuminates how factors like tourism, translation, and world music venues have shifted the ethics of place embedded in the tarantella cultural tradition. Once rural, religious, and rooted, tarantella now thrives in settings urban, secular, migrant, and ethnic. The book argues that the genre's changing dynamics contribute to reimagining southern Italian identity, especially in relation to the Italian Southern Question; in fact, they help Southern Italian groups redefine their own identities as immigrants within a larger Mediterranean and postcolonial context. They also translate tarantella into a different kind of performance that serves new social and cultural groups and purposes. Indeed, as tarantella moves from local and national Italian festivals to the Italian diaspora as well as to New Age and world-music scenes, its growth promotes a reassessment of gender relations in the Italian South and helps create space for Italian and Italian American women to reclaim gendered aspects of the genre.

Digital food and foodways: How online food practices and narratives shape the Italian diaspora in London

The article discusses the role of online food practices and narratives in the formation of transnational identities and communities. Data has been collected in the framework of a doctoral research project undertaken by the author between 2009 and 2012 with a follow-up in 2014. The working hypothesis of this article is that the way Italians talk about food online and offline, the importance they give to ‘authentic’ food, and the way they share their love for Italian food with other members of the same diaspora reveal original insights into migrants’ personal and collective identities, their sense of belonging to the transnational community and processes of adjustment to a new place. Findings suggest that online culinary narratives and practices shape the Italian diaspora in unique ways, through the development of forms of virtual commensality and online mealtime socialization on Skype and by affecting intra and out-group relationships, thus working as elements of cultural identification and differentiation.