Vincenzo Rosato (a cura di), Dossier: 150 anni della nostra storia: la pastorale agli emigrati nelle Americhe / 150 years of our history: the pastoral care of Italian migrants in the Americas (Introduzione / Introduction, pp. 530-532), pp. 530-695

Andrew Brizzolara, 110 anni fa. Una “riedizione” dei 100 giorni della visita di Scalabrini in Nord America / “110 Years ago”. The 100 Day Visit of Bishop Scalabrini to the United States Revisited, pp. 533-563

From August 3rd to November 12th, 1901, Bishop Scalabrini, Roman Catholic ordinary of the Northern Italian diocese of Piacenza, visited Eastern North America both as a spiritual leader to the many Italian laborers who had fled his diocese to find bread and work in America and as the personal representative of the Holy See assessing, for the pope, the situation and needs of the Italian migrant. This article revisits the events surrounding the journey, reconstructs the itinerary of Scalabrini in as much detail as documentation and contemporary press coverage will permit, attempts to evaluate the effect that this media event may have had on altering the public’s attitudes and prejudices towards the Italian migrant of the day, and examines the motivations of the man and the changes in his own attitudes towards the specific ministry of the religious communities which he founded and the future policies of the Holy See.

Matteo Sanfilippo, Chiesa e immigrati italiani nel Nord America: il caso dell’Ontario / Church and Italian immigrants in North America: the case in Ontario, pp. 564-589

In recent decades there have been many studies on Italians in Canada, or essays on the role of the Catholic Church in the immigrant Italian communities there. But they aim to build a single model, working in parallel on what happened in Quebec and in English Canada, thus ignoring differences in the historical development of these two sets. Secondly, they did not give sufficient attention to the specificity of Ontario in Canada and to the comparison among the Ontarian case and what happened in other English-speaking provinces of East or West Canada. Finally, they did not stress that the intervention in favor of Italians in Ontario followed the lines of previous actions and earlier debates in the United States. Recovering these three elements in a small number of pages is not a walk, but this essay will try to do it by analyzing the Holy See’s archives and the historical literature on Italians in Ontario.

Roberto Marinucci, Immigrazione italiana, istituti missionari e cattolicesimo brasiliano. Gli intricati cammini della missione alla fine del XIX secolo / Italian migration, missionary Institutes and Brazilian Catholicism. The difficult missionary efforts at the end of the 19th century, pp. 590-614

The massive Italian migration to Brazil, at the end of the 19th century, provoked an immediate response from the Church, by sending many missionaries for the pastoral care of the immigrants. In Brazil, the newcomers found a church not sufficiently structured and in the process of transformation, because of the end of the proprietorship and the beginning of the process of romanization. Scope of the article is to analyze the mission of the foreign religious Institutes responsible for the Italian immigrants within the socio- religious Brazilian environment, by considering the various factors that interacted in the missionary activity. Thus, after presenting the situation of the Brazilian Church at the end of the 19th century, the main features of the Italian immigration and of the missionary religious Institutes, the article describes how the immigrant communities structured their religious practice and the role of the foreign religious missionaries. If it is correct to affirm that the missionary Institutes contributed to the preservation of the faith among the immigrants and to enrich the Brazilian Catholicism, it is also important to state that, over time, they were transformed by the encounter with the local Catholicism.

Vincenzo Rosato, L’emigrazione italiana in Argentina. Una serie di studi su questo fenomeno condotti dal CSER / Italian migration in Argentina. A variety of studies on this phenomenon promoted by the Center of Studies in Rome (CSER), pp. 615-632

In almost 50 years, the Center of Migration Studies in Rome (CSER) has extensively researched the Italian migration to Argentina over the past two centuries and published many books and articles, in order to describe various aspects of this specific phenomenon. This article tries to analyze 5 different features of the Italians in Argentina: 1) a short history of the phenomenon; 2) jobs available for Italians; 3) the different regions of Italian immigrants; 4) the Italian settlements in the Argentinian country; 5) the pastoral care of the Italian immigrants. Surely, the work is not done yet and must be continued by studying the cross-cultural developments and the innovations of the newer generations, as well as by reflecting more in depth on the pastoral involvement of the Church and of the religious institutes at the service of the Italians in Argentina.

Daniele Natili, L’emigrazione nel discorso e nelle realizzazioni coloniali e post-coloniali italiane (1861-1947) / Italian view on migration and its colonial and post-colonial realization (1861-1947), pp. 633-652

Shortly after the unification of Italy, when the Italian government and diplomacy did not have yet a colonial vision, a minority group belonging to the geographical and commercial circles, began to put pressure on the Italian government to start a colonial expansion based on Italian communities settled in non-European countries. They suggested that it was possible to expand the Italian economic influence, especially in South America and North Africa, by means of Italian emigrants’ colonies. When Eritrea was founded, also the parliament and the government began to consider the possibility to direct migration towards the new colony with the purpose of populating it. After the defeat of Adwa, in 1896, this experiment of demographic colonialism as well as the Italian military action in East Africa were interrupted. Later on, the major industry, the commercial circles and the merchant marine started again to consider the colonies of Italian emigrants settled spontaneously in Latin America, especially in the Plata region, as means to extend Italian economic influence. Migration and colonial conquest began to be strongly connected again during the campaign of nationalistic “party” to support the war in Libya, where Corradini and others thought to direct migration from Italy. Fascism tried to do that, in 1938, by transferring twenty thousand Italian people in Libya in order to start its agrarian colonization. After the war, a large part of Italian ruling classes went on thinking about Libya as a place where to direct migration from Italy.

Catherine Dewhirst, Lifting the Veil: Migrant Murder, a «madre italiana», and the Politics of Transnational Colonisation, pp. 653-674

The Italian imperialist program of the period before the Great War went beyond the project to annex other Mediterranean territories in order to include the colonization of the immigrant communities. Today, historians tend to concentrate on Italian foreign policy rather than on the perspective and experience of migration. This essay begins with a murder case in the United States to show a type of Italian response to the international agenda, by deepening the role of the press abroad, and especially of a newspaper editor. The analysis of the pressures on a worker who emigrated from the southern Italy allows us to evaluate the function of gender, class and race in the discourse of transnational politics.

Alcides Beretta Curi, L’immigrazione europea nella formazione del tessuto imprenditoriale: l’Uruguay e le nazioni circostanti (1870-1900) / European immigration and formation of the business community in Uruguay and surrounding countries (1870-1900), pp. 675-695

The complex processes of changes,that took place in the last decades of the 19th century and interested the countries of South America, brought to the development of agricultural production for export and to a greater relation with the world market, to a growth in the urbanization accompanied by the development of a sector of industry, to a restructuring of society, to the reception of foreign investments contributing to the development of services, to a variable but constant flow of European immigrants. The European presence is considered specifically one of the main reasons for the changes. In this article, in relation to the region that includes Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and South Brazil, it is analyzed the role of European immigration in regards to the formation of business associations and the organization of production sectors.