Gaetano Rando, Gerry Turcotte, Mai lontan dal cuore. Manifestazioni e trasmutazioni del rapporto con il paese di origine / Absence makes the Heart grow fonder. The Relationship with One’s Place of Origin: Expressions and Changes, pp. 787-794

The field of Italian Australian studies is both diverse and dynamic. It dealt with topics not in line with its supposed “traditional” scope and it has identified new areas of concern to scholars in the field. This volume examines from a post-colonial perspective one of the many cultural practices: i.e. the creation of literature, by migrants from Sicily and Calabria the two major Italian regional groups in Australia. By re-creating some aspects of their ancestral experience in the new frontier, these migrants avoid the danger of losing it and, at the same time, seek to reconcile their past with their present, thus creating a dynamic hybrid culture which is both Italian and Australian. What this volume clearly shows is that a distinctive profile, like any great cultural force, is always in a state of evolution and of self-questioning. In this way a culture is never stable, never predictable and never complacent.

Venero Armanno, All’ombra del Vulcano / In the Shadow of the Volcano, pp. 795-805

Born in Brisbane, of Sicilian parents, Venero Armanno has studied, traveled, and worked all over the world. He authored eight novels, four of which have enjoyed international success. His elegant account of the way Sicily and Australia interconnect both through the experience of the Italian immigrant community to which he once belonged, and through his own writing and research in the producing of his novel The Volcano, offers a mordant and sharp insight into the way time and space are remembered and invented. In Armanno’s novels The Volcano, Romeo of the Underworld, and Firehead, Brisbane is a mythical capital linked to Sicily generically by its hot climate and, specifically, but not without a tinge of ambiguity, by the Cloudland Ballroom, seen as a mirror image of Mt Etna, the most explosive volcano in Europe, considered, since the classical times, the portal to the underworld.

Antonio Casella, La letteratura della Nostalgia: il lungo viaggio / The literature of Nostalgia: the Long Journey, pp. 807-818

Antonio Casella, who migrated to Australia from Sicily at age 15, writes novels that explore themes of displacement and reconciliation in the migrant experience. A good part of Casella’s work is a mirror of the changing relationship between Sicilian characters and their environments, and maps the evolution of Sicilian traditional practices in an Australian context charting the relevance of past experiences to present dilemmas. Speaking of his novel in progress, he describes a metaphor that reminds us of the wider dilemma of migration, when two quasi siblings, one raised in the Mediterranean, the other in Australia, discover each other and come together. Both young people are seeking an identity that goes beyond the confines of the space and culture they were born into. In coming together, each contributes something to the other and, by consequence, to himself; and that is the ultimate triumph of any relationship. It is perhaps, too, the triumph of the Diaspora experience?

Gerardo Papalia, A dulurusa spartenza. L’espressione linguistica della nostalgia / A Painful Departure: Lyrical Expression of Longing, pp. 819-836

Gerardo Papalia’s paper analyses examples of cultural re-inscription and hybridisation of emigrants by recourse to Homi Bhabha’s concept of “diasporic space”. Italians migrating to Australia have been empowered by their invention of cultural devices which adapted Italian practices and belief systems to a hitherto alien environment. Faced with an “unknown” Australian space they would often long to return to their past cultural and socio-economic spaces, however unrealistic this may have been. In reconciling their “past” with their present, these migrants created a dynamic hybrid culture which was both Italian and Australian. The nostalgia expressed in their poetry, with its yearning for the lost homeland and family, thus became the wellspring of a renewed desire to recreate something familiar and comforting but also more suited to the new reality Italian migrants inhabited. In so doing it laid the basis for a rich culture of migration.

Joseph Pugliese, Le altre Italie: identità geopolitiche, genealogie razzializzate e storie interculturali / The Other Italies: Geopolitical identities, Racialised Genealogies and Intercultural Stories, pp. 837-854

Joseph Pugliese’s paper proposes a strikingly innovative area in the field of Italian Australian studies by investigating an aspect of a long-term but largely unexplored cultural dichotomy represented by the Italian presence in Australia. Traditionally the minority of Australians who have displayed interest in Italian culture have done so exclusively in relation to Italy’s institutionally promoted high culture while the majority of Italian migrants in Australia embody a complex and heterogeneous cultural tradition that has developed in their region of origin over many hundreds of years. Pugliese examines the different ways Southern Italian migrants in an Australian context have mapped their own non-hegemonic cultural assertions against representations of the Italian nation by its own high cultural agencies. The concerns of this paper pivot on the point of intersection generated by the visual politics of using copies of Michelangelo’s David to represent Italianness within an Australian context.

Gaetano Rando, Cronotopi del paese natio e di quello d’adozione nell’immaginario calabroaustraliano / Chronotypes of the Countries of Origin and Destination in Calabrian Australian Poetry and Narrative, pp. 855-876

In contradistinction to prior homogenising attempts to consider the global rubric of “Italian Australian writing” this paper systemically attempts to locate the distinguishing traits and localised experiences that mark the production of poetry and narrative by Italian Australian writers from a Calabrian background by exploring the extent to which texts produced by these writers demonstrate marked characteristics of what might be termed a Calabrian Australian migration experience.

John Gatt-Rutter, Scrivere la biografia di un siciliano d’Australia: Sebastiano Pitruzzello: l’uomo – la famiglia – l’industria di Piero Genovesi / Writing the Life of a Sicilian Australian. Piero Genevosi’s Sebastiano Pitruzzello: the Man, the Family, the Company, pp. 877-886

John Gatt-Rutter’s paper examines an example of perhaps the most common type of text in the Italian Australian literary corpus, the achieved life as a canonical subject of life writing, analysing the cultural and social issues related to the writing of the biography of Sebastiano Pitruzzello from Sortino in Sicily. Pitruzzello, who began his Australian experience as a welder, went on to become a noted cheese manufacturer in Victoria. As Gatt-Rutter makes clear, the life story and success of one migrant become the symbol of the larger Sortino diaspora, including the formation of a distinctive community in Melbourne whose ties with the hometown are ongoing and dynamic. This paper gauges the relative weight of uniqueness and representativeness, of ethnic belonging and (post)modern openness and the determinacy of the historical moment, focusing on some differences from the expected pattern, as well as the epic resonances of the text.

Federico Farini, Vittorio Iervese, Il progetto COMICS: significati e pratiche di partecipazione per i giovani immigrati a Modena / The COMICS Project: Meaning and Practice of Participation among Young Immigrants in Modena, pp. 887-905

This paper reports on the results of a research studying the aspects of the social practices of citizenship, and the construction of identities by young immigrants; the analysis of the social wellness and integration of the participants. To analyze the social participation and wellness of the interviewed we haven’t used indicators elaborated by other researches or by previous theoretical studies: we chose, instead, to build our own indicators accordingly to what the participants indicated during the interviews as the most relevant aspects of their everyday life. This paper finds that participation in the relevant processes of the host society requires neither uncritical engagement in its cultural forms nor full sharing of the meanings of cultural symbols. Social participation is effected through a series of processes of negotiation and mixing of symbols, meanings and cultural forms, through intercultural communication, both in school and in dealing with their peers. As categories like “integration” and “adaptation” seem to oversimplify the degree of participation, this paper wants to stress the variety of meanings, expectations and problems encountered by young immigrants, on the path to integration accordingly to their autonomous self-expression.

Gennaro Errichiello, Il ruolo della moschea in immigrazione. Ricerca di campo nel casertano / The role of the mosque in immigration. Field research in the Caserta area, pp. 907-926

The presence of Muslims in Italy is a fact which we must cope with every single day. Thus it is of capital importance that we know where they go to pray, and where they meet. In the course of my ethnographic work, I became familiar with the Islamic settlement of San Marcellino, a little town near Caserta, where was erected one of the largest mosques in all of southern Italy. In a context of migration, a mosque plays different roles: it is, of course, a religious place where the faithful worship Allah (God), and perform Islamic rituals. But it accomplishes also the additional important function of being a place for socializing, where men, women and children encounter one another. They go there to stay together, to discuss, but also to buy food, books, and, most importantly, to find the meat slaughtered according to Islamic religious customs (halal). All these different functions are reflected in the activities of the mosque where I did my fieldwork.

Giulia Scalettaris, Senegalesi e questione abitativa a Udine. Uno studio empirico / Senegalese Immigrants and the housing issue in Udine. An empirical study, pp. 927-946

Based on a one-year fieldwork, this study analyses Senegalese housing patterns in Udine. By examining Senegalese immigrants’ housing strategies and social practices the research traces how the national community acts as a solidarity group in facilitating its members to find housing solutions. This capacity is based on the one hand on the strong disposition of Senegalese immigrants to share housing spaces, and on the other hand on their high mobility. It results in an articulated system of accommodations, within which different types of cohabitation are established. As Senegalese social relations take place mostly in houses, the study also focuses on the community social life by describing community life within apartments and the “visit system” that connects all Senegalese accommodations. The comparison with other Italian contexts proved very fruitful, because it led to acknowledge that Senegalese strategies, as well as the structure of the solidarity group, change according to the local context and the stage of the immigration process. In particular in Udine, a place of settlement, the solidarity group is much more articulated as a result of the diversification of strategies and of the enhanced need of dealing with the external context.

Flavia Piperno, L’altra faccia del nostro welfare: il drenaggio di cura nei paesi di origine. Il caso della Romania / The other face of our care giving system: the drainage of care giving workers in their country of origin. The Rumanian case, pp. 947-967

Our home care system appears to be indissolubly tied to a supply of care givers imported from abroad. In the course of the last few years, we have become accustomed to consider the care giving offered by women from Eastern Europe, as an integral part of our own family organization. But what happens in their own country of origin? What is the impact of the migration of an increasing number of women, who are still the main source for care giving, upon family, society and also the institutional welfare system? What avenues are sought and chosen by the trans-national family and by the actors that relate to it, to compensate the loss, and re-establish the balance? Which are the needs that it is hard to satisfy? This article based on a multisided empirical research conducted over a collection of life stories, is aimed at answering these questions beginning with the case of Rumania.

Franco Pittau, Antonio Ricci, I rimpatri assistiti degli immigrati: il caso italiano / Assisted repatriation of immigrants: the Italian case, pp. 969-976

This predicament is little known, because, usually, we deal with it in connection with the forced repatriation of illegal immigrants, who, cannot, however, enjoy the benefit of these provisions. Only a few categories of people can be affected: asylum seekers, aliens accepted for humanitarian reasons, people rescued from situations of sexual exploitation. In conclusion and based upon the possibility of “return”, we must remember that forcibly shipping away the irregulars, brings about heavy load of negative effects even from the financial point of view: the resources used for these operations are subtracted from the funds destined to subsidize the policies of integration. It becomes thus necessary, to find other ways of solution.

Paola Scevi, I delitti di favoreggiamento delle migrazioni illegali / The crime of abetting illegal migrations, pp. 977-992

The Italian code does not qualify the illegal entry of an alien into the territory of the State as a criminal act, unless it be the case of the illegal re-entry of a subject previously expelled. The provisions of the penal code are not primarily concerned with the behaviour of the “clandestine”, but rather with situations of abetting the illegal entry, i.e. of promoting illegal immigration. Consequently, situations reflecting and identical criminal intent are punished in a like manner, whether Italy be the final destination, or just an intermediate stage in process of clandestine immigration. This serves also the purpose of establishing the premises for an international cooperation towards containing the migratory flux, and thwarting illegal immigration in the spirit of the Schengen Agreement. The code also punishes favouring the sojourn upon the territory of the State of illegal foreigners; when the crime is committed with the purpose of drawing an unfair gain from the illegal conditions of the stay of the alien who is oppressed by burdensome conditions, not consistent with a regular synallagmatic relationship.

Matteo Sanfilippo, Parrocchie ed immigrazione negli Stati Uniti / Parishes and Immigration in the United States, pp. 993-1005

Please find here the presentation and critical evaluation of two important works that, recently, have re-proposed the problem of Immigrant Parishes in the context of the pluralistic development of the Catholic Church in the United States: one by Timothy Matovina – Guadalupe and Her Faithful. Latino Catholics in San Antonio from Colonial Origins to the Present – and the other by Richard Juliani – Priest, Parish and People. Saving the Faith in Philadelphia’s “Little Italy”.