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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MIGRATION HISTORY
Edited by
Stéphane Mourlane · Céline Regnard ·
Manuela Martini · Catherine Brice
Palgrave Studies in Migration History
Series Editors
Philippe Rygiel, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon,
Saint-Germain-du-Puy, France
Per-Olof Grönberg, Luleå University of Technology, Luleå, Sweden
David Feldman, Birkbeck College—University of London, London, UK
Marlou Schrover, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
This series explores the history of migration, from antiquity to the present
day and across a wide geographical scope. Taking a broad definition of
migration, the editors welcome books that consider all forms of mobility,
including cross-border mobility, internal migration and forced migra-
tion. These books investigate the causes and consequences of migration,
whether for economic, religious, humanitarian or political reasons, and
the policies and organizations that facilitate or challenge mobility. Consid-
ering responses to migration, the series looks to migrants’ experiences,
the communities left behind and the societies in which they settled.
The editors welcome proposals for monographs, edited collections and
Palgrave Pivots.
More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15185
Stéphane Mourlane · Céline Regnard ·
Manuela Martini · Catherine Brice
Editors
Italianness
and Migration
from the Risorgimento
to the 1960s
Editors
Stéphane Mourlane Céline Regnard
Aix-Marseille University Aix-Marseille University
Aix-en-Provence, France Aix-en-Provence, France
Manuela Martini Catherine Brice

LARHRA CRHEC
Lumière University Paris-Est Créteil University
Lyon, France Créteil, Paris, France
Palgrave Studies in Migration History

ISBN 978-3-030-88963-0 ISBN 978-3-030-88964-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88964-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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Acknowledgments
This book is based on a selection of some papers presented at an

international conference held in Paris at the National Museum of the
History of Immigration and at the Italian Cultural Institute (16–17
June 2017) on the occasion of the exhibition “Ciao Italia. A Century
of Italian Migration and Culture in France, 1860–1960). This conference
has been benefited from the support of different research centers: the
Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po (Paris), the Centre de Recherche en
Histoire européenne comparée (CRHEC) (Université Paris-Est Créteil),
the LARHRA (Université Lumière Lyon 2- Université Jean Moulin-Lyon
3—Université Grenoble-Alpes-ENS de Lyon-CNRS), the Mediterrapolis
LIA (Aix-Marseille Université-CNRS-École française de Rome- Sapienza
Università du Roma- Università degli Studi Roma Tre) and TELEMMe
(Aix-Marseille Université-CNRS). The conference and the book have
been funded by the Institut Universitaire de France.
The editors warmly thank Marianne Amar (Musée national de l’histoire
de l’immigration), Loretta Baldassar (University of Western Australia),
João Fabio Bertonha (State University of Maringá), Michele Colucci
(ISSM-CNR), Donna Gabaccia (University of Toronto), Fabrice Jesné
(École française de Rome), Marc Lazar (CHSP, Sciences Po Paris),
Matteo Sanfilippo (Università della Tuscia—Fondazione CSER), Camille
Schmoll (Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Joseph Sciorra
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
(Queens College, City of New York University), Benjamin Stora (Musée

national de l’histoire de l’immigration), Donatella Strangio (Università
degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza) who took part in the conference
scientific committee.
Contents
So Many Italies in so Many Suitcases 1

Stéphane Mourlane, Céline Regnard, Manuela Martini,
and Catherine Brice
Italians Through Their Travels

The Risorgimento Italians’ Journeys and Exile Narratives
Flight, Expedition, or Peregrination? 27
Delphine Diaz
From Italy to the Levant: Mediterranean Itineraries
of the Venetian Émigrés in 1849 39
Giacomo Girardi
“He Is All American Now”: Italian–Americans
in the Italian Campaign of World War II 49
Manoela Patti
Italianness, Flexible Citizenship and Belonging:
Unraveling Paths of Emigrants’ Descendants’ “Return”
in Northeastern Italy 61
Melissa Blanchard
vii
viii CONTENTS
Italian Institutions
Italianness in Colonial Tunisia Through the Dante
Alighieri Society (1893–1920) 75
Gabriele Montalbano
The Promotion of Italianness in Argentina During
the Interwar Period 85
Laura Fotia
The Ventottisti, or the Generation of 1928: Italian
Consuls, the Spread of Fascism and the Question of Italian
Imperialism 95
João Fábio Bertonha
The Italianization of the Italian–American and Fascism’s
Entrance into American Ethnic Politics, 1930–1935 107
Jessica H. Lee
Emigration for Adoption: The National Catholic Welfare
Conference and the Adoption of Italian Children
in the United States 119
Silvia Cassamagnaghi
Italian Words
Italian Language in Exile in France in the First Half
of the Nineteenth Century 133
Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro
Italianità Under Influence: Filippo Manetta, a Mazzinian
Exile in America, a Confederate Agent in Italy 143
Bénédicte Deschamps
The Writing and Pidgin of Occasional Miners Native
to Emilia Working in Pennsylvania and Illinois
(1898–1914) 157
Marco Fincardi
From the Local Identity of Basilicata Nel Mondo
to the National Community of Italiani Pel Mondo: Italian
Press and Emigration (1924–1930) 169
Gaetano Morese
CONTENTS ix
Manifestations of Italianness
Crisscross Italianities—Circulations, Identifications,
and Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul 183
Marie Bossaert
A Paper Trail: Italian Migrants in Marseille and Buenos
Aires (1860–1914) 199
Thibault Bechini
“Bread Denied by the Nation” the Italians Abroad
Exhibitions Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries 207
Anna Pellegrino
When the Italians Came on the Scene: Immigration
and Negotiation of Identities in the Popular Theater
of São Paulo in the Early Twentieth Century 227
Virginia de Almeida Bessa
Index 241
Notes on Contributors
Virginia de Almeida Bessa is collaborating professor in the Institute of

Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo and in the Music Post-
Graduate Program at the University of Campinas. Her research focuses on
popular music history and the transnational circulation of musical theater.
She is the author of the book A escuta singular de Pixinguinha (Alameda
Editorial, 2010) awarded by the Funarte Prize of Critical Studies in Music
and translated to french in 2019 (Pixinguinha ou la singularité d’une
écoute, Presses Universitaires du Midi).
Thibault Bechini holds a doctorate from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
University, with a thesis on the contribution of Italian migrants to the
urbanization of Marseille and Buenos Aires (1860–1914). He is a fellow
of the Convergences Migrations Institute; his research now focuses on the
estates of Italians who died abroad at the end of the nineteenth century.
João Fábio Bertonha has a Ph.D. in history from the University of
Campinas, the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (accreditation to
supervise research) from the University of São Paulo, and further post-
doctoral qualifications from the University of Rome, the University of São
Paulo, and the European University Institute. He has also been a specialist
in strategic studies and defense at the National Defense University of the
United States, a researcher at the Brazilian National Council for Scien-
tific and Technological Development (CNPq), and a visiting researcher
in many countries. He is currently a professor at the State University of
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Maringá and has written dozens of books and articles in his research fields.
http://joaofabiobertonha.com
Melissa Blanchard is a senior research fellow at Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), working at Centre Norbert Elias,
Marseille.
She received a joint Ph.D. in Anthropology at Aix-Marseille Université
I and Università degli Studi di Modena. Her research interests include
migration, mobilities, and gender. She has published a monograph on
Senegalese migrant women in Marseille and has edited a book on religious
mobility. Her latest research analyzes “return migration” from Chile and
Argentina toward Italy and other European countries. She has published
extensively on this theme in both English and French.
Marie Bossaert is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Naples
Federico II (Scuola Superiore Meridionale) and a fellow at the Institut
Convergence Migrations. She obtained a Ph.D. in history in 2016 at the
École Pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Istituto Italiano di Scienze
Umane, with a dissertation entitled Connaître les Turcs et l’Empire
ottoman en Italie. Constructions et usages des savoirs sur l’Orient de l’Unité
à la guerre italo-turque. Her research focuses on the history of schol-
arly Orientalism, especially in Italy, in the Ottoman empire and Algeria,
and on the social, political, and cultural history of the Mediterranean
(nineteenth-first twentieth c.). A former fellow at the École française
de Rome, she dedicated several studies to the circulations between Italy
and the Ottoman empire and co-edited the special issues Transturkology
(European Journal of Turkish Studies, 2017) and “La fabrique transna-
tionale de la ‘science nationale’ en Italie” (Mélanges de l’École française de
Rome, 2018).
Catherine Brice is professor in modern history at Université Paris-Est
Créteil, CRHEC, and member of the Institut Universitaire de France
(2013–2018). Her research has addressed different topics. She first
worked on politics and architecture in Liberal Italy and published Monu-
mentalité publique et politique à Rome: le Vittoriano (1870–1943),Rome,
1998, an exhaustive enquiry on the Monument to Victor-Emmanuel II
located in the center of Rome. She then switched from the monument to
the monarchy itself, questioning the part played by the Savoia dynasty in
the construction of Italian identity at the end of the nineteenth century
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
(La monarchie et la construction de l’identité nationale italienne (1861–

1900),Paris, EHESS, 2010). A funded project on Fraternity, conducted
between 2008 and 2012, saw her research interests expand beyond
Italy and into political anthropology (with Gilles Bertrand and Gilles
Montègre (co-ed.), Fraternité. Pour une histoire du concept, Grenoble,
2012; Catherine Brice (ed.), La fraternité en actions: Frères de sang, frères
d’armes, frères ennemis en Italie (1824–1924), Rome, 2017). She met
Italian exiles while carrying out this research (with Sylvie Aprile (ed.),
Exil et fraternité au XIXème siècle, Bordeaux, 2013), and she designed
a project on exile and innovation, specifically the circulation of polit-
ical “technologies” (Delphine Diaz and Catherine Brice (ed.), Mobilités,
savoir-faire et innovation au XIX e siècle, Revue d’histoire du 19 ème siècle,
2017-1; Catherine Brice (ed.), Mobilités créatrices, Diasporas. Circula-
tions, migrations, histoire, 2017-2). The discovery of vast, unexploited
archives on the confiscations of exiles’ properties led her to create a new
project in which she questions the modernizing effects on states of confis-
cating policies. This new project deals with the comparative history of
administration, material sovereignty, and policies (Catherine Brice (ed.),
Séquestres et confiscations des biens des exilés dans l’Italie du 19 ème siècle,
MEFRIM, 2017-2. She published an edited volume Exile and the circu-
lation of political practices in the nineteenth century, Cambridge Scholars,
2020
Silvia Cassamagnaghi is a researcher and lecturer in contemporary
history at the Università degli Studi, Milan, Italy. She also participates
as a columnist in history programs for Italian national television. Her
main topics include Italian-American cultural relationships, media studies,
gender studies, and the history of emigration and she has published
several articles about these subjects. Her most recent book, Oper-
azione Spose di guerra. Storie di amore e di emigrazione (Feltrinelli,
2014), is focused on the experience of young Italian girls who married
American soldiers during World War II and emigrated to the United
States.
Bénédicte Deschamps is associate professor in American studies at the
Université de Paris, where she teaches US history. She has published
numerous articles on Italian-American history and has co-edited several
books, including Les Petites Italies dans le monde, Rennes, Presses Univer-
sitaires de Rennes, 2007 and Racial, Ethnic, and Homophobic Violence:
Killing in the Name of Otherness,London: Routledge Cavendish, 2007.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
In 2020, she published a history of the Italian-American press from the

Risorgimento to WWI (Histoire de la presse italo-américaine du Risorg-
imento à la Grande guerre, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2020) and in 2021
she co-edited (with Pantaleone Sergi) a volume on the Italian immi-
grant journalism in the world (Voci d’Italia fuori d’Italia : Giornalismo e
stampa dell’emigrazione, en collaboration avec Pantaleone Sergi, Cosenza,
Pellegrini editore, 2021).
Delphine Diaz is associate professor in nineteenth-century history at
the University of Reims, France, and a member of the Institut universi-
taire de France (IUF). Former student of the École Normale Supérieure,
she obtained a Ph.D. in history in 2012 at the University of Paris
Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2014, she published a book entitled Un asile
pour tous les peuples? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers dans la France du premier
xix e siècle (Augustin Thierry prize from the History Committee of Paris).
Her research focuses on political exiles and asylum policies in France
and Europe in the nineteenth century. Between 2016 and 2020, she
coordinated a research program funded by the Agence Nationale de la
Recherche (AsileuropeXIX, “Towards a European history of exile and
asylum during the 19th century”). She is the author of a forthcoming
book on the history of refugees in Europe (En exil. Les réfugiés en Europe
de la fin du XVIII e siècle à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, « Folio », 2021).
Marco Fincardi conducts research on social history and popular culture
and teaches contemporary history at the Ca’ Foscari University of
Venice. He is a member of the scientific committee for the journal
“Memoria e ricerca” and for the Gramsci Emilia-Romagna Foundation.
He has published: La terra disincantata (Unicopli, 2001); Emigranti a
passo romano. Emigranti dell’Alto Veneto e Friuli nella Germania hitle-
riana (Cierre, 2002); and Campagne emiliane in transizione (Clueb,
2008).
Laura Fotia has a Ph.D. in European and International Studies and
the Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale as Associate Professor in Amer-
ican History and Institutions. She is Adjunct Professor of Contemporary
History of Latin America and History and Institutions of Latin America at
the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Roma Tre. She
was Adjunct Professor, Research Fellow, and Visiting Fellow at university
departments and research institutes in several European and American
countries. Her research interests include cultural and political relations
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
between Argentina, United States, and Italy; transitional justice, human

rights violations, and “hate politics” in Latin America.
Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro is associate professor in Italian studies at
Paris 8 University. Her research focuses on the construction of Italian
national identity (nineteenth–twentieth centuries). Her latests works are
on political exiles from the countries of Southern Europe during the
nineteenth century (Les exilés politiques espagnols, italiens et portugais en
France au 19e: questions et perspectives, ed. L. Fournier-Finocchiaro &
C. Climaco, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2017), and on intellectual exchanges
and networks in the nineteenth century between France and Italy (Entre
France et Italie: échanges et réseaux intellectuels au XIX e siècle, ed. M.
Colin, L. Fournier-Finocchiaro & S. Tatti, Transalpina,21, 2018, online
https://journals.openedition.org/transalpina/285).
Giacomo Girardi obtained his Ph.D. in History from the University
of Milan and Université Paris-Est Créteil. He is post-doc Fellow at the
Archivio del Moderno, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
and a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation project “Milan
and Ticino (1796–1848). Shaping the Spatiality of a European Capital”.
His research focuses on nineteenth-century political history. He published
articles in Italian and international journals and books, and he edited a
volume on the antiquity of Sicily (Lionardo Vigo, Protostasi sicula, Roma,
2017). He is a member of the editorial board of the journal “Il Risorgi-
mento. Rivista di storia del Risorgimento e di storia contemporanea” and
member of the Scientific Committee of the Center for European Studies
(Università di Verona).
Jessica H. Lee is the executive director of Freedom & Citizenship, an
educational program for low-income New York City high school students
run through Columbia University’s Center for American Studies. Jessica
received her Ph.D. in history from Columbia in 2016 with a disserta-
tion titled “To the Seventh Generation: Italians and the Creation of an
American Political Identity, 1921–1948”. Her research interests center
on questions of citizenship, political identity, and mass migration. Her
forthcoming manuscript examines Italy’s successful politicization of its
migrants in America before and during World War II.
Manuela Martini is professor in modern history at the Université
Lumière Lyon 2 (France) and a member of the Institut Universitaire
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
de France. She belongs to numerous scientific organizations and advi-

sory boards and is a member of the editorial committee of the journal
Gender & History. Her research lies at the intersection between the
history of the family and gender, labor history, and migration studies. She
has published extensively in French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English
and has authored or edited twenty-five books and journals’ special issues
on European economic history, gender history, and international labor
migrations. Her publications include the authored book Bâtiment en
famille. Migrations et petite entreprise en banlieue parisienne au XXe siècle,
CNRS Éditions, 2016 and the collective book What is work? Gender ant
the Crossroads of Home, Family and Business from the Early Modern Era to
the Present (edited with Raffaella Sarta and Anna Bellavitis), Oxford-New
York, Berghhan, 2018 (paperback 2020). For further details, see: http://
larhra.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/membre/506.
Gabriele Montalbano obtained his Ph.D. in Late modern history at
EPHE of Paris with a joint supervision with the University of Florence
(2018). His Ph.D. thesis focuses on the Italian nation-building in the
French Protectorate of Tunisia. He is currently adjunct professor of
history of colonial and postcolonial spaces at University of Bologna, and
post-doc researcher at SciencesPo of Paris on slavery in late Ottoman and
colonial Libya. Alumnus of “Collegio Superiore dell’Alma Mater Studio-
rum”—University of Bologna and of “École Normale Supérieure” of
Paris, he was visiting scholar at the “Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb
Contemporain” of Tunis and at Remarque Institute of New York Univer-
sity. His main research interests concern the social, cultural, and political
history of the Mediterranean area in the age of Imperialism.
Gaetano Morese, Ph.D. in history, many times adjunct professor, he
carried out research for various public and private cultural institutions
and foundations. Actually, he is studying youth participation in the Euro-
pean integration between the ’70s and ’90s. Member of the scientific
committee for the journal “Rassegna Storica Lucana”, his main interests
are the ruling classes’ history and the social, economic, cultural, and land-
scape dynamics. He attended many national and international seminars
and conferences, including The migration conference (Bari, 2019) and
The Transatlantic Studies Association 18th annual conference (Lancaster
UK, 2019) with a paper on “A country built on the paper «Italiani per
mondo»”. Among his recent works, there are essays on the Italian refer-
endum of 1946 ( 2020), on the identification and discrimination process
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii
(2020), and a monograph on the Home Front during the First World
War (2018).
Stéphane Mourlane is associate professor in modern history at Aix-
Marseille University (France) and researcher at TELEMMe-Maison
Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en-Provence. He is a
former member of the École Française de Rome and has been a visiting
scholar at New York University (2015) and North Carolina State Univer-
sity (2017). His research interests focus on Italian migration, especially in
the south of France, and Italian culture around the Mediterranean space.
He has published (with C. Regnard) Empreintes italiennes. Marseille et
sa région(2014), (with A. Delpirou) Atlas de l’Italie contemporaine. En
quête d’unité (2011), and (with Y. Gastaut and R. Schor) Nice cosmopo-
lite1860–1980(2010). He is editor (with V. Baby-Collin, S. Bouffier) of
Atlas des migrations en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à nos jours (2021),
(with J. Boutier) Marseille l’Italienne. Histoires d’une passion séculaire
(2021), (with D. Païni) Ciao Italia. Un siècle d’immigration et de culture
italiennes en France(2017), (with Baby-Collin, S. Mazzella, C. Regnard,
and P. Sintès) of Migrations et temporalités en Méditerranée. Les migra-
tions à l’épreuve du temps XIXe-XXIe siècles (2017), (with E. Canepari
and B. Mesini) of Mobil hom(m)es. Formes d’habitats et modes d’habiter
la mobilité XVI e -XXI e siècles (2016), (with L. Anteby-Yemini, V. Baby-
Collin, S. Mazzella, C. Parizot, C. Regnard, and P. Sintès) of Borders,
Mobilities and Migrations. Perspectives from the Mediterranean, nineteenth
and twenty-first Century (2014), and (with C. Regnard) of Les batailles de
Marseille. Immigration, violences et conflits XIX e -XX e siècles (2012). He
has also been editor of the following special issues: “L’Europe en mouve-
ment”, Homme & Migrations (2017) and “L’immigration italienne dans
le Sud-Est de la France. Nouvelles perspectives”, Archivio Storico dell’Em-
igrazione Italiana(2015). He was a scientific advisor of the “Ciao Italia!”
exhibition at the National Museum of Immigration History in Paris
(2017). He is a member of the editorial committee of the journal Studi
Emigrazione.
http://telemme.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/membres/St%C3%A9phane_Mour
lane
Manoela Patti is assistant professor in contemporary history at the
University of Palermo, Department of Political Sciences and Interna-
tional Relations. Her research interests mainly focus on World War II, the
history of the Mafia and its transnational networks, fascism, migration,
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
and Republican Italy. Her current project deals with the history of radical
psychiatry movement in Italy, where she is focusing on the Southern Italy
and Psichiatria Democratica. Her publications include: Un ponte ancora
aperto? Alcune note sull’emigrazione siciliana verso gli Stati Uniti durante
il fascismo, in Migrazioni e Fascismo, «Meridiana. Rivista di storia e scienze
sociali», n. 92, 2018, which she co-edited with G. D’Amico; Il rinnova-
mento psichiatrico in Sicilia prima della Legge 180 (1968–1978), in G.
Mamone, F. Milazzo (eds), Storia e psichiatria. Problemi, ricerche, fonti,
Biblion, Milan 2019; and the monographs La mafia alla sbarra. I processi
fascisti a Palermo, Istituto Poligrafico Europeo, Palermo 2014; La Sicilia
e gli alleati. Tra occupazione e Liberazione, Donzelli, Rome 2013.
Anna Pellegrino is associate professor in contemporary history at
Bologna University. She is also an associate researcher at the Labo-
ratoire ICT/Paris Diderot 7 and at the CNAM (Paris). Her research
interests have focused on the history of work culture in industrial soci-
eties and the great World Fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Her publications include “Les Fées machines”. Les ouvriers ital-
iens aux Expositions universelles (1851–1911),Paris, Classiques Garnier,
2017; Lacittà più artigiana d’Italia. Firenze 1861–1929, Milano, Fran-
coAngeli, 2012; Italian workers and the universal exhibitions of the
nineteenth century: imaginaries and representations of technology and
science,Quaderns d’Història de l’Enginyeria, vol. 13 (2012), pp. 97–114;
and Entre clasicismo e industria: imágenes del país del arte en las Exposi-
ciones Universales del siglo XIX, en Sofía Diéguez Patao (ed.), Los lugares
del arte: Identidad y representación, Barcelona, Laertes, 2014.
Céline Regnard is associate professor in modern history at Aix-
Marseille University, France. As a researcher, she is a part of the
research unit TELEMMe(Temps, Espaces, Langages, Europe Médirionale-
Méditerranée) in the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme
in Aix-en-Provence, institution of which she is deputy director. She is also
a former member of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a former junior fellow
of the Institut Universitaire de France and a former visiting scholar to the
Moïse A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora(North Carolina State
University), USA.
She obtained a Ph.D. in history in 2006. Her research explores migra-
tion history, with a focus on Marseille as a transit place for Italian and
other migrants before Word War I. Recently, her main focus has been on
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
Syrian migration. She has published several books and papers on migra-
tion history. Recent among them are En Transit. Les Syriens à Beyrouth,
Marseille, Le Havre, New York (1880–1914), Anamosa, 2021; « The
Transit Stage as a Migratory Experience. The Syrians in Marseille (1880–
1920) », in Christina Reimann, Martin Öhman (eds.), Migrants and
the Making of the Urban-Maritime World, New York/ London, Rout-
ledge, 2021; “Stopgap Territories: Inns, Hotels and Boarding Houses
in Marseille at the beginning of the 1870s”, Quaderni storici, 2016;
“Urban growth and police reform in Marseille (1855–1908)”, Urban
History, 2016; Migrations et temporalités en Méditerranée. Les migra-
tions à l’épreuve du temps (XIX e -XX e siècle), (as an editor) 2017;
Borders, Mobilities and Migrations: Perspectives from the Mediterranean,
nineteenth-twenty-first Century, (as an editor) 2014; and Empreintes ital-
iennes. Marseille et sa région, (with S. Mourlane), 2013. http://telemme.
mmsh.univ-aix.fr/membres/C%C3%A9line_Regnard.
List of Figures
The Risorgimento Italians’ Journeys and Exile Narratives

Flight, Expedition, or Peregrination?
Fig. 1 Map of Angelo Frignani’s itinerary between 1829
and 1831 (Source AsileuropeXIX: https://asileurope.
huma-num.fr [map designed by Hugo Vermeren]) 30
Fig. 2 Map of Cristina di Belgiojoso’s itinerary between 1848
and 1850 (Source AsileuropeXIX: https://asileurope.
huma-num.fr [map designed by Hugo Vermeren]) 36
The Italianization of the Italian–American and Fascism’s

Entrance into American Ethnic Politics, 1930–1935
Fig. 1 Chart of foreign language students in New York City,
1932–1936 (Source Dr. Alberto C. Bonaschi, “The
Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages: Italian,” (New
York: Board of Education, March 30, 1936), MSS 40
Leonard Covello Papers, Box 97 F. 2, Balch Institute,
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) 113
From the Local Identity of Basilicata Nel Mondo to the

National Community of Italiani Pel Mondo: Italian Press
and Emigration (1924–1930)
Fig. 1 La Basilicata nel mondo, n. 2, 1924 (Source Biblioteca
Nazionale, Potenza) 172
xxi
xxii LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2 Italiani pel Mondo, n. 1, 1928 (Source Biblioteca

Communale, Varese) 178
“Bread Denied by the Nation” the Italians Abroad

Exhibitions Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries
Chart 1 Departures of Italian emigrants during the first 50 years
after national unification 211
Fig. 1 The Italians Abroad Exhibitions Pavillion in Milan 1906.

Cartolina ufficiale dell’esposizione 1906 210
Fig. 2 Cover, L’Italia al Perù, rassegna della vita e dell’opera
italiana nel Perù, Lima, 1906 213
Fig. 3 Cover, Gli Italiani nella repubblica argentina, Buenos
Aires, 1906 214
Fig. 4 Cover, Gl’Italiani in Isvizzera, compilata per cura del
giornale La Nazione italiana (Vevey, Tip. del giornale,
1906) 215
Fig. 5 Italian businessman in his vineyard called “Gambellara”,
in Stabilimento viti-vinicolo di Domenico Tomba
in Belgrano di Mendoza, Repubblica Argentina (Album
fotografico), 1906 216
Fig. 6 Still section and moving presses, in Stabilimento
viti-vinicolo di Domenico Tomba in Belgrano di Mendoza,
Repubblica Argentina (Album fotografico), 1906 217
Fig. 7 Società Italiana di Mutuo Soccorso Anziana, in Gl’Italiani
in Isvizzera, compilata per cura del giornale La Nazione
italiana (Vevey, Tip. del giornale, 1906) 218
Fig. 8 Nel Padiglione degli italiani all’estero. La Mostra della
Dante Alighieri di Buenos Aires in Milano e l’esposizione
Internazionale del Sempione 1906, n. 18, 270 220
Fig. 9 Mostra degli italiani all’estero. Colonia Eritrea (fot.
Varischi, Artico e c., Milano), in Milano e l’esposizione
Internazionale del Sempione 1906, n. 17, 243 222
LIST OF FIGURES xxiii
When the Italians Came on the Scene: Immigration and

Negotiation of Identities in the Popular Theater of São
Paulo in the Early Twentieth Century
Fig. 1 Map 1–Italian migration to Brazil (1878–1902) Source
Angelo Trento Do outro lado do Atlântico: Um século de
imigração italiana no Brasil (São Paulo: Nobel, 1988), 39 230
Fig. 2 Map 2–Italian migration to Brazil (1903–1920) (Source
Angelo Trento Do outro lado do Atlântico: Um século de
imigração italiana no Brasil (São Paulo: Nobel, 1988), 60) 231
Fig. 3 Excerpt from the column of Juó Banère (Source O
Pirralho, October 21, 1911, p. 10) 234
So Many Italies in so Many Suitcases
Stéphane Mourlane, Céline Regnard, Manuela Martini,

and Catherine Brice
There is a paradox in the history of modern Italy. Italian unification, a

long process that began in the nineteenth century, was taking place just
as millions of people were leaving their native lands to live in the United
States or elsewhere in Europe. This concurrence impacted on the way in
S. Mourlane (B) · C. Regnard

Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, TELEMME, Aix en Provence, France
e-mail: stephane.mourlane@univ-amu.fr
C. Regnard
e-mail: celine.regnard@univ.amu.fr
M. Martini
LARHRA, Lumière University Lyon 2, Lyon, France
e-mail: manuela.martini@univ-lyon2.fr
C. Brice
CRHEC, Paris-Est Créteil University, Créteil, Paris, France
e-mail: catherine.brice@u-pec.fr
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Mourlane et al. (eds.), Italianness and Migration from the Risorgimento
to the 1960s, Palgrave Studies in Migration History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88964-7_1
2 S. MOURLANE ET AL.
which the Italian nation was defined and on the Italian people’s sense of
belonging.1
The construction of the Italian state was largely based on the devel-
opment of the notion of “Italianness” (Italianità). This word, whose
use has been attested since the middle of the nineteenth century,2 orig-
inally referred to the quality of being Italian, especially with regard to
language, geography, people, artistic works, and heritage.3 Reading like
an inventory of the nature and qualities of Italy, it encompassed what Italy
represented in these nationalist times in the same way that the words
“Greekness” and “Romanness” are used to refer to the worlds of the
two great ancient civilizations and their artistic output. In the second half
of the century, the “engineers of Italianness”4 began to manipulate the
concept for political purposes. For some historians, Italianness sustained
a national discourse that was based on a now almost biological connec-
tion with the mother country.5 It had to be maintained, preserved, and
passed on in order to ensure the regeneration that was necessary for the
development of a “Great Italy.”6 Moreover, the well-known saying “Fatta
l’Italia, bisogna fare gli Italiani” (Italy has been made, now we have to
make Italians), which has virtually become a proverb, made this all the
more pressing. In the middle of the nineteenth century, national unity
was a new development, and regional allegiances, dialects, and cultures
still dominated. Moreover, the departure of millions of nationals across
the Alps and the Atlantic raised questions about the strength of the Italian
unitarian project.
1 Manuela Martini, “Migrazioni: communità e nazione,” Memoria e Ricerca 8 (1996):

8; Matteo Sanfilippo, Problemi di storiografia dell’emigrazione italiana (Viterbo: Sette
Città, 2002), 213; Emilio Franzina, “La patria degli italiani all’estero,” Il Mulino 4 (July–
August 2011): 611.
2 Daniel Grange, “La société ‘Dante Alighieri’ et la défense de l’ ‘Italianità’,” Mélanges
de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée 117, no. 1 (2005): 261.
3 Silvana Patriarca, Italianità. La costruzione del carattere nazionale (Rome-Bari:
Laterza, 2010).
4 Giulio Bollati, “L’Italiano,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1, I caratteri originali (Turin:
Einaudi, 1979), 949–1022.
5 Alberto Mario Banti, Sublime madre nostra: la nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al
fascismo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2011), VII.
6 Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia. Il mito della nazione nel XX secolo (Rome-Bari:
Laterza, 2011), 36.
SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 3
However, as some studies have shown,7 migration and exile did not
weaken national sentiment but rather contributed to strengthening and
perhaps even embodying it.8 Italian emigrants were generally poorly
received abroad.9 As a result, those who did not feel very Italian when
they left would go on to discover, feel, and affirm their connection with
the mother country through a multiplicity of experiences that varied
according to the contexts of their arrival.10
The way in which migration phenomena are studied strongly influ-
ences the level of attention historians give to identity. Since the 1980s,
researchers have been gradually abandoning both the state-centered
approaches, and the macroeconomic prism of push-and-pull explanations
(and also consequently studies of immigration or emigration, those linear
trajectories from a departure point to an arrival point) to concentrate
instead on the individuals concerned. The focus is now on the migrants’
complex movements and on migratory flows within a sometimes vast
sphere whose common denominator is the migrants.11 In the case of the
Italian migrants, studies have highlighted the extent of temporary migra-
tions, of travels back and forth between their adopted and homelands, and
7 For a global historiographical approach, see in particular: Donna Gabaccia, “Italian

History and Gli italiani nel mondo, Part I,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2, no.
1 (1997): 45–66; Donna Gabaccia, “Italian history and Gli italiani nel mondo, Part
II,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 3, no. 1 (1998): 73–97; Sanfilippo, Problemi di
storiografia.
8 Jean-Charles Vegliante, “L’émigration comme facteur d’italianisation au tournant du
siècle,” in Vert, blanc, rouge. L’identité nationale italienne. Actes du colloque des 24
et 25 avril 1998 (Rennes: LURPI, 1999), 223–43; Ludovico Incisa Di Camerana, Il
grande esodo: storia delle migrazioni italiane nel mondo (Milano: Corbaccio, 2003), 77–
90; Mark I. Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2008); Paola Corti, “Le dinamiche dell’italianità nella storia
delle migrazioni nazionali,” Passato e Presente 89 (2011): 89; Sanfilippo, Problemi di
storiografia, 213; Franzina, “La patria degli italiani,” 612.
9 Matteo Sanfilippo, Faccia da Italiano (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2011).
10 Martini, “Migrazioni,” 7; Corti, “Le dinamiche dell’italianità,” 89; Donna Gabaccia,
“L’Italia fuori d’Italia,” in Storia d’Italia, Annali 24: Migrazioni, eds Paola Corti and
Matteo Sanfilippo (Turin: Einaudi, 2009), 227.
11 Loretta Baldassar, “Ritorni e viste in Patria: la circolarità dello spazio migratorio,” in
Storia d’Italia, eds Corti and Sanfilippo, 469; Paola Corti, Temi e problemi di storia delle
migrazioni italiane (Viterbo: Sette Città, 2013), 18.
even of permanent returns,12 which accounted for around half of those

who had departed. This renewed theoretical approach has quite naturally
been accompanied by a semantic shift whereby the vocabulary now used
comes from the domain of migration and the migrants. The emergence
of the concepts of flow and migration has also led to a rethink of the
notion of integration. Contributions from the field of ethnic studies since
the 1960s have played a significant role in this regard.13 Postulating that
ethnic and cultural identities did not disappear in host societies but rather
coexisted alongside new allegiances14 in a form of transculturation,15
proponents of the ethnic approach switched to analyzing the migrant’s
“adjustment process,” as understood from a comparative perspective.16
This meant no longer just examining possible “double loyalties”17 but
also reflecting on the modalities of forming “mixed identities,”18 which
resulted not just from links between the community of departure and
the host country but also from substantial contact with other migrant
populations present in the same place at the same time. All Italians
12 George R. Gilkey, “The United States and Italy: Migration and Repatriation,”
Journal of Developing Areas 2 (1967): 23–35; Betty Boyd Caroli, Italian Repatriation
from the United States, 1900–1914 (Staten Island, NY: Center for Migration Studies,
1973); Francesco Paolo Cerase, L’emigrazione di ritorno: innovazione o reazione? L’es-
perienza dell’emigrazione di ritorno dagli Stati Uniti d’America (Rome: Istituto Gini,
1971); Dino Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 1870–1929
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Loretta Baldassar, Visits Home. Migra-
tion Experience between Italy and Australia (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University
Press, 2001); Francesco Paolo Cerase, “L’onda di ritorno,” in Storia dell’emigrazione ital-
iana. Partenze, eds Pietro Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi and Emilio Franzina (Rome:
Donzelli, 2001), 113–25.
13 Dino Cinel, “Ethnicity: A Neglected Dimension of American History,” The Interna-
tional Migration Review 3 (1969): 58–63.
14 George E. Pozzetta, “Immigrants and Ethnics: The State of Italian-American
Historiography,” Journal of American Ethnic History 1 (1989): 67–95.
15 Marie-Christine Michaud, “The Italians in America: From Transculturation to
Identity Renegotiation,” Diasporas 19 (2012): 41–51.
16 Samuel L. Baily, “The Adjustment of Italian Immigrants in Buenos Aires and New
York, 1870–1914,” The American Historical Review 2 (1983): 281–305.
17 Mona Harrington, “Loyalties: Dual and Divided,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of Amer-
ican Ethnic Groups, eds Stephan Thernstrom, Anna Orlov, Oscar Handlin (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 676–86.
18 Maurizio Ambrosini, “La costruzione di identità trasversali: relazioni e appartenenze
sociali attraverso i confini,” in Storia d’Italia, eds Corti and Sanfilippo, 674.
were contributing, in accordance with their location, to an ever-changing

definition of Italianness. In the field of social sciences, Italianness is, there-
fore, by its very nature, a concept that requires a multi-site, comparative
study.19
Due to the influence of anthropology since the 1990s,20 the prefix
“trans” has been added to the root “migrant” to refer to an individual
who develops and maintains diverse relationships—familial, economic,
social, religious, and political—between their host country and their
country of departure through practices that are now called “transna-
tional.”21 Although migration historians have debated the novelty of this
phenomenon,22 transnationalism has been imposed on them as an analyt-
ical framework. In the 1990s, in an extension of Cohen’s analyses,23
some historians (particularly Anglo–American historians) saw the dias-
poric approach as a means of better understanding the ways in which
transnational identities are structured.24 During the last decades, the dias-
poric approach has been expanded upon and discussed.25 It was noted
19 Maddalena Tirabassi, “Transnazionalismo, diaspora, generazioni e migrazioni ital-

iane,” in Itinera. Parigmi nelle migrazioni italiane, ed. Maddalena Tirabassi (Turin:
Edizioni Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 2005), 10.
20 Linda Basch, Nina Glick-Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound:
Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States
(London: Routledge, 1994).
21 Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “Transnationalism:
A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration,” in Towards a Transnational
Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered, eds Nina
Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton (New York: New York Academy
of Science, 1992).
22 Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald, “Transnationalism in Question,” American
Journal of Sociology 109, no. 5 (2004): 1177–95.
23 Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1997).
24 George E. Pozzetta and Bruno Ramirez, The Italian Diaspora: Migration Across the
Globe (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1992); Rudolph J. Vecoli, “The
Italian Diaspora 1876–1976,” in The Cambridge Survey of World Migration, ed. Robin
Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114–22; Lydio F. Tomasi, Piero
Gastaldo, and Thomas Row, The Columbus People: Perspectives in Italian Immigration to
the Americas and Australia (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1994); Fondazione
Giovanni Agnelli, 1994; Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2000).
25 In 2005, Donna Gabaccia wrote: “se dovessi scegliere un titolo per Italy’s Many
Diasporas, oggi, preferirei intitolarlo Tutto il mondo è paese. (Nondimeno, sono anche
certa che qualunque editore anglofono al quale mi rivolgessi con un titolo simile lo
that the migrants had never defined themselves as a diaspora26 and that
there had never been either one single “Italy outside of Italy” or an
Italy that had accurately reproduced the real Italy inside another national
border.27 The expression “hyphenated Italians”28 refers to an Italianness
that was common to all Italians in the Peninsula and to the construction
of a specific model.29 This Italianness was not necessarily a central compo-
nent of the migrants’ identity, however, because, as Gabaccia pointed out,
“their attachment to Italy was familial, personal and sometimes cultural,
but [it] existed independently of a sincere sense of identity and national
loyalty in their relationship with the new country.”30 It seems very diffi-
cult or futile even to measure the degree of Italianness contained within
this identity.31
Understood in the sense of migratory flows, migration, therefore,
appears to be a prerequisite for the elaboration, maintenance, and evolu-
tion of Italianness, which is taken here to mean a continuous process
of invention, encounters, exchanges, and negotiation that results in the
development of individual and collective cultural identities that vary
rifiuterebbe.) Con tale titolo, spererei di richiamare l’attenzione su tematiche di differenza

di classe e sui linguaggi di etnicità, nazionalismo o de-territorializzazione che i migranti
lavoratori stessi elaborarono dalle loro esperienze. Spererei, al contempo, di evidenziare
quanto cruciale fu l’influenza della classe nel processo di costruzione della nazione tra i
migranti. Un motivo per cui mi sono trovata a disagio a parlare di una diaspora italiana
è che così poche tra le persone immigrate che ho studiato – con un’eccezione tra alcuni
intellettuali anglofoni (me inclusa) – abbiano loro stessi utilizzato questa terminologia o
metafora.” Donna Gabaccia, “Diaspore, discipline e migrazioni di massa dall’Italia,” in
Itinera, ed. Tirabassi, 162–63.
26 Gabaccia, “Diaspore, discipline e migrazioni di massa dall’Italia,” 141–72.
27 Donna Gabaccia, “L’Italia fuori d’Italia,” in Storia d’Italia, eds Corti and Sanfilippo,
226.
28 Enzo Cafarelli, “Italiani col trattino,” in Dizionario Enciclopedico delle Migrazioni
Italiane nel Mondo, eds Tiziana Grassi, Enzo Caffarelli, Mina Cappussi, Delfina Licata,
and Gian Carlo Perego (Rome: SER, 2014), 391.
29 Corti, “Le dinamiche dell’italianità,” 89.
30 Gabaccia, “L’Italia fuori d’Italia,” 247. Unless otherwise indicated, this and all
subsequent quotations from Italian sources have been translated into English via French.
31 Emilio Franzina, “Una patria espatriata. Lealtà nazionale e caratteri regionali nell’em-
igrazione italiana all’estero (secoli XIX e XX),” Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana,
Quaderni 2 (2016): 7.
through space and time.32 The Italianness that we seek to define in this
book is not a reality set in stone but rather a process whose temporal and
spatial modalities continuously evolve.
Italianness in the second half of the nineteenth century was largely a
political project with an internal mission that was linked to the national
unification context. During the Risorgimento and right up until the end of
the nineteenth century, the populations that the state needed to win over
through a sense of national belonging were mainly the peasant masses,
for whom the monarchy played a unifying role.33 Although the “Great
Emigration” was the subject of much debate in political and economic
circles,34 the young liberal state showed little concern until the beginning
of the twentieth century.35 Beyond the autonomous process of identifica-
tion and unification that takes place within groups of foreigners perceived
negatively in their host countries36 and beyond the forms of sociability
linked to the “Little Italies”37 pattern of settlement, national sentiment
was spreading among these Italian emigrants, especially those attached to
their local and regional “little homelands.” The driving force behind this
was the actions of the migrant elites (who were either Risorgimental exiles
or business professionals), regardless of their political divisions or any
32 Martini, “Migrazioni,” 7; Corti, Temi e problemi, 95; Amalia Signorelli, “Dal-

l’emigrazione agli italiani nel mondo,” in Storia d’Italia, eds Corti and Sanfilippo,
487–503.
33 Catherine Brice, La monarchie et la construction de l’identité nationale italienne
(1861–1900) (Paris: EHESS, 2010).
34 Ercole Sori, “Il dibatto politico sull’emigrazione italiana dall’Unità alla crisi dello
stato liberale,” in Gli Italiani fuori d’Italia, ed. Bruno Bezza (Milan: Franco Angeli,
1983), 19–43.
35 Caroline Douki, “The Liberal Italian State and Mass Emigration, 1860–1914,” in
Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation, eds Nancy
L. Green and François Weil (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 91–113; Choate,
Emigrant Nation.
36 Corti, “Le dinamiche dell’Italianità,” 91.
37 Maria Susanna Garroni, “Little Italies,” in Storia dell’Emigrazione italiana. Arrivi,
eds Pietro Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi and Emilio Franzina (Rome: Donzelli,
2002), 207–33; Donna Gabaccia, “Global Geography of ‘Little Italy’: Italian Neigh-
bourhood in Comparative Perspectives,” Modern Italy 1 (2006): 9–24; Marie-Claude
Blanc-Chaléard et al., Les Petites Italies dans le monde (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de
Rennes, 2007).
tensions linked to competition at the economic level.38 Some elemental

“ethnic emblems”39 had thus begun to appear in references to local
and national origins, such as in company insignias and shop signs and
in the names of mutual aid societies and leisure associations.40 Remit-
tances,41 fundraising for natural disasters in Italy,42 and participation in
the funding of national monuments43 were also symbolic markers. While
little is known about the reception of these symbolic actions among the
vast majority of illiterate or semi-literate Italian migrants, we do know
that, in Rome, there was a growing awareness of emigration’s value and
benefits in terms of economics and foreign policy. The Luzzati Act of
1901 marked the first turning point in the state’s approach to migra-
tion. Italy’s general commission for emigration was responsible for its
coordination,44 while the diplomatic and consular network was entrusted
with the task of structuring the Italian “colonies” abroad.45 Both bodies
lacked resources, however, and the “defense of Italianness” was most
38 Fernando J. Devoto, “La primera elite política italiana de Buenos Ayres (1852–
1880),” Studi Emigrazione 94 (1989): 168–93; Angelo Trento, “Italianità in Brazil: A
Disputed Object of Desire,” in The Columbus People, eds Tomasi, Gastaldo, and Row,
264.
39 Werner Sollors, Alchimie d’America. Identità etnica e cultura nazionale (Rome:
Editori Riuniti, 1990), 299.
40 Emilio Franzina, L’immaginario degli emigranti. Miti e raffigurazioni dell’esperienza
italiana fra due secoli (Treviso: Paese Pagus Edizioni, 1992).
41 Luigi Mittone, “Le rimesse degli emigrati sino al 1914,” Affari Sociali Inter-
nazionali 4 (1984): 125–60; Ercole. Sori, “Mercati e rimesse: il ruolo dell’emigrazione
nell’economia italiana,” in Storia d’Italia, eds Corti and Sanfilippo, 249–83.
42 Franzina, “La patria degli Italiani,” 611.
43 Catherine Brice, Monumentalité publique et politique à Rome Le Vittoriano (Rome:
École française de Rome, 1998).
44 Francesco Grispo, “La struttura e il funziamento degli organi preposti all’
emigrazione (1901–1919),” in La formazione della diplomazia italiana 1861–1915, ed.
Laura Pilotti (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1988), 709–30; Fabio Del Giudice, “Il commis-
sario generale dell’emigrazione nel suo sviluppo storico (1901–1928). Personale, uffici,
competenze,” in La formazione, ed. Pilotti, 748–73; Maria Rosaria Ostuni, “Momenti
della ‘constrasta vita’ del commissariato generale dell’emigrazione (1901–1927),” in Gli
Italiani, ed. Bezza, 101–18.
45 Ludovico Incisa di Camerana, “Diplomazia,” in Storia dell’Emigrazione italiana.
Arrivi, eds Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina, 457–79; Consoli e consolati italiani
dagli stati preunitari al fascismo (1802–1945), eds Marcella Aglietti, Mathieu Grenet, and
Fabrice Jesné, (Rome: École française de Rome, 2020).
often delegated to institutions like the Dante Alighieri Society,46 the

Italian chambers of commerce,47 and the Church.48 Schools, both public
and private, secular and religious, were the subject of particular atten-
tion because they taught the language, which was seen as central in the
affirmation of Italianness.49 This seems to have been confirmed by the
substantial mobilization of Italian–Americans during World War I.50
Moreover, Italianness continued to be developed during the Fascist
period. All Italians, even those outside the Peninsula, were included in a
national, totalitarian project.51 Piero Parini, who was head of the general
directorate of Italians abroad, wrote that “according to Mussolini, the
Italian abroad is a citizen. Living a long way from the “mother coun-
try” as a result of his own self-sacrifice and not, as he would wish, on
Italy’s divine soil, he is an Italian who, through the love he still has for
his country despite his long absence, deserves to be specially compensated
with our care and affection.”52 The fasci all’estero, whose membership was
growing, was the cornerstone of the propaganda machine, which aimed to
46 Beatrice Pisa, Nazione e politica nella Società “Dante Alighieri” (Rome: Bonacci
Editore, 1995); Patrizia Salvetti, Immagine nazionale ed emigrazione nella Società “Dante
Alghieri” (Rome: Bonacci Editore, 1995); Stéphane Mourlane, “Emigrazione e italianità:
il comitato nizzardo della Società Dante Alighieri (dal 1900 agli anni Trenta),” Archivio
Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana 11 (2015): 48–56.
47 On the main Italian chambers of commerce globally, see Giulio Sapelli, Tra identità
culturale e sviluppo di reti. Storia delle Camere di commercio italiane all’estero (Soveria
Mannelli: Rubettino, 2000) and Giovanni Luigi Fontana and Emilio Franzina, Profili di
camere di commercio italiane all’estero (Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2001).
48 Carlo Bellò, “Scalabrini, Bonomelli e l’emigrazione italiana,” Studi Emigrazione 37
(1975): 3–44; Gianfausto Rosoli, Insieme oltre le frontiere. Momenti e figure dell’azione
della Chiesa tra gli emigrati italiani nei secoli XIX e XX (Caltanissetta-Rome: Salvatore
Sciascia Editore, 1996); Matteo Sanfilippo, “Chiesa, ordini religiosi ed emigrazione,” in
Storia dell’emigrazione italiana. Partenze, eds Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina,
127–42; Matteo Sanfilippo, “La Chiesa catttolica,” in Storia dell’Emigrazione italiana.
Arrivi, eds Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina, 481–88.
49 Patrizia Salvetti, “Le scuole italiane all’estero,” in Storia dell’Emigrazione italiana.
Arrivi, Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina, 535–49.
50 Sanfilippo, Problemi di storiografia, 207.
51 For a historiographical and bibliographical approach, see Mario Pretelli, “Il fascismo e
gli italiani all’estero. Una rassegna storiografica,” Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana
8 (2009): 161–72; João Fábio Bertonha, Fascismo, antifascismo e gli italiani all’estero.
Bibliografia orientativa (1922–2015) (Viterbo: Edizioni Sette Città, 2015).
52 Piero Parini, Gli Italiani nel Mondo (Milan: Mondadori, 1935), 34.
keep migrants in the national fold and ensure the regime’s international
influence.53 Every Italian had to be loyal to the mother country since
this loyalty would build the foundations of and the conditions for inclu-
sion in an ideologized Italianness. Only Fascists were recognized as having
full Italianness.54 Although party membership remained low, the regime’s
social and cultural policies, which were aimed particularly at young people
(who would gather in the case d’Italia under the supervision of the
consuls),55 undoubtedly led to the wider diffusion of a Fascist Italianness
that was based on a discourse of historical continuity and glorification
of the national genius. This unabashed national assertion allowed exiled
Italians to claim an unembarrassed dual allegiance. The Italian–Ameri-
cans were the most successful example of this.56 Nevertheless, claims of
Italianness were not the prerogative of Fascism, and the regime’s exiled
opponents, even those with internationalist ideologies, did not escape the
question of national belonging.57 The Italianness of migrants continued
to be a political issue.
The postwar period brought a return to calm, however. As dissen-
sion between the Christian Democrats and the Communists continued,
Italianness took a less political, more cultural turn. As a result of
regional government policies within the Peninsula, which most notably
53 Emilio Gentile, “La politica estera del partito fascista. Ideologia e organizzazione dei
Fasci italiani all’estero (1920–1930),” Storia contemporanea 6 (1995): 897–956; Emilio
Franzina and Matteo Sanfilippo, Il fascismo e gli emigrati. La parabola dei Fasci ital-
iani all’estero (1920–1943) (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003); Mario Pretelli, Il fascismo e gli
Italiani all’estero (Bologna: CLUEB, 2010); Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, “Enjeux de la
diplomatie culturelle fasciste. De l’Italien à l’étranger à l’Italien nouveau,” Mélanges de
l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée 1 (2002): 163–78; Francesca Cavarocchi,
Avanguardie dello spirito. Il fascismo e la propaganda culturale all’estero (Rome: Carocci,
2010).
54 Gentile, La Grande Italia, 160.
55 Daria Frezza Bicocchi, “Propaganda fascista e comunità’ italiane in USA: La Casa
Italiana della Columbia University,” Studi Storici 4 (1970): 661–97; Caroline Pane,
“Le Case d’Italia in Francia. Organizzazione, attività e rappresentazione del fascismo
all’estero,” Memoria e Ricerca 41 (2012): 160–73.
56 Philip V. Cannistraro, “Fascim and Italian Americans,” in Perspectives in Italian
Immigration and Ethnicity, ed. Lydio F. Tomasi (New York: Center for Migrations
Studies, 1977), 51–66; João Fábio Bertonha, “Fascism and Italian Communities in Brazil
and the United States,” Italian Americana 19, no. 2 (2001): 146–57.
57 Eric Vial, L’Union Populaire Italienne 1937–1940. Une organisation de masse du
parti communiste italien en exil (Rome: École française de Rome, 2007).
supported associative activity abroad, it combined with renewed refer-

ences to regional origins.58 Italianness thus remained a vague sense of
belonging based on cultural traditions that were maintained to a greater
or lesser extent by successive generations. In the last decades of the twen-
tieth century, what had once been considered a stigma was now worn as
a badge of honor, a “label” that connected the individual with a renewed
interest in Italian culture and its internationally popular “made in Italy”
products.59 As the mass migratory flows dwindled, Italianness prevailed.60
It was even revitalized by a strong memory dynamic61 that was expressed
in a variety of forms in everyday life,62 in associative activity, and in
cultural output (literature, film, music, newspapers, television) through
commemorative events63 and heritage and museum projects.64 At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, Italianness even found itself being
58 Giovanna Campani, Maurizio Catani, and Salvatore Palidda, “Italian immigrant asso-
ciations in France,” in Immigrant Associations in Europe, eds John Rex, Daniele Joly,
and Czarina Wilpert (Aldershot: Gower, 1987), 166–200; Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound
by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora (London: Cranbury,
1997).
59 Corti, “Le dinamiche dell’Italianitàn” 96; Aurélien Delpirou and Stéphane Mourlane,
Atlas de l’Italie contemporaine (Paris: Autrement, 2019): 88–89.
60 Franzina, “La patria degli Italiani,” 614; Gabaccia, “Italian History and Gli italiani
nel mondo, part I,” 53.
61 Michele Colucci, “Storia o memoria? L’emigrazione italiana tra ricerca storica, uso
pubblico e valorizzazione culturale,” Studi Emigrazione 167 (2007): 721–28; Stéphane
Mourlane and Céline Regnard, “Invisibility and Memory: Italian Immigration in France
During the Second Half of the 20th Century,” in Borders, Mobilities and Migrations:
Perspectives from the Mediterranean, eds Lisa Anteby-Yemini et al. (Brussels: Peter Lang,
2014), 267–87; Stéphane Mourlane and Matteo Sanfilippo, “Mémoires de migrations
entre France et Italie,” Hommes & Migrations n°1317–1318 (2017): 25–36.
62 Joseph Sciorra, Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
63 Marie-Christine Michaud, Columbus Day et les Italiens de New York (Paris: Presses
Universitaires Paris-Sorbonne, 2011).
64 Loretta Baldassar, “Migration Monuments in Italy and Australia: Contesting Histories
and Transforming Identities,” Modern Italy 11, no. 1 (2006): 43–62; Lorenzo Principe, “I
Musei delle migrazioni,” Studi Emigrazione 167 (2007); Maddalena Tirabassi, “I Luoghi
della memoria delle migrazioni,” in Storia d’Italia, eds Corti and Sanfilippo, 709–24;
Laura E. Ruberto and Joseph Sciorra, “Migrating Objects: Italian American Museums
and the Creation of Collective Identity,” Altreitalie (January–June 2018): 131–54.
reinvented with a boom in the number of new Italian emigrants, who

were more skilled than their predecessors.65
While it is clear then that this link between migration and Italianness
varied in time and space, it needs to be embodied, situated, for us to fully
grasp its malleable contours.
***
Our book addresses this question by redoubling the vantage points in
terms of both the different perspectives brought by researchers of various
nationalities and the fields of analysis, which cover Italian emigration
across North America, South America, Europe, North Africa, and the
Middle East.
Part I examines the impact of the flows, journeys, migrations, and
exiles on Italianness.
All the authors in this section highlight the flexible, polysemic, and
sometimes instrumental nature of this notion. Italianness seems, in the
migration context, to be an invention in the sense of Hobsbawm and
Ranger’s “invention of tradition.”66 However, just because it has been
invented does not mean it does not exist. Quite the contrary in fact. Its
many facets make it a widely used resource by both actors and institutions.
The Italianness that Delphine Diaz talks about was still an idea, a
dream, a plan that had been formulated by the exiles from different states
in the Peninsula who were involved in the Risorgimento process. Italy was,
at the time, first and foremost a political notion. It was not a univocal
one though. There were immense differences both between Mazzini’s
supporters and the defenders of a state that was to be built under the aegis
of the Piedmont–Sardinia monarchy and between those who believed in
Pius IX as the herald of unity and those who dreamed of a federal state.
What they all had in common, however, was that they had fought for
their idea of a future Italy and had then had to leave their country of
origin and go into exile. Delphine Diaz focuses on the different types of
65 Matteo Sanfilippo, “La nuova emigrazione italiana (2000–2017): il quadro storico e

storiografico,” Studi Emigrazione 207 (2017): 359–78; Hadrien Dubucs et al., “Je suis
un Italien de Paris. Italian Migrant’s Incorporation in a European Capital City,” Journal
of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43 (2017): 578–95.
66 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Italianness that these exiles carried with them in their luggage as well as
the material aspects of the various types of migrations they made, such
as their itineraries, how they perceived the migration (Frignani saw it as
flight, Belgiojoso as a kind of “tourism,” etc.), and their lifestyles abroad.
For all these exiles, there was never just one migration from point A to
point B but rather a series of forced migrations, and the idea of returning
to the mother country was never far from their minds.67
The accounts that Frignani, Ruffini, Belgiojoso, and many other
migrants gave of their exile—or “journey,” to borrow Nancy Green’s
term68 —contributed to creating a political narrative that helped shape
an image of the Risorgimento. This image increased the popularity
throughout Europe of the “Italian cause,” which was now subject to
public opinion.69 Their accounts, which cover different periods (1821
for Frignani, 1830s for Ruffini, after 1848 for the Princess of Belgio-
joso), construct the figure of the “poor exile”—and therefore, implicitly,
act as a condemnation of the Italian states, which were still obscuran-
tist and reactionary—and a memory of the mother country, which was
detached from political considerations and linked instead to emotions,
flavors, and colors. The nineteenth-century exiles’ Italianness was cultural,
literary, and, above all, international, and it circulated in Europe through
these autobiographical accounts, which are a rich source for historians.70
This notion of a transnational Italianness also runs through Melissa
Blanchard and Manoela Patti’s articles.71 As Italian migrants returned
home to Trentino and as the Italian–American soldiers stepped back onto
home soil with the 1943 Sicily landings, their negotiated Italianness came
67 For a more instrumental interpretation of national identity among exiles, see Yossi
Shain, The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-State (1989; 2nd
edition Michigan University Press, 2005) and Catherine Brice, “Les élites italiennes en
exil: déclassement, déplacement et rattrapage (1821–1870),” Migrations d’élites, eds Nancy
L. Green and Marianne Amar, (forthcoming).
68 Nancy L. Green, “Trans-frontières: pour une analyse des lieux de passage,” Socio-
Anthropologie 6 (1999): 38–48.
69 Elena Bacchin, Italofilia. Opinione pubblica britannica e Risorgimento italiano (1847–
1864) (Rome: Carocci 2014).
70 Matteo Sanfilippo, “Le autobiografie di migranti italiani,” Studi Emigrazione 182
(2011): 321–32.
71 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999); Jonathan Fox, “Unpacking Transnational Citizenship,”
Annual Review of Political Science 8 (2005).
face to face with a more essentialist Italianness that had been constructed
by the authorities. The Trentino emigrants and their descendants were
given the right to reclaim their original nationality in the name of an
Italianness that was recognized by the Italian authorities. Melissa Blan-
chard shows us that this was a resource seized upon by these actors,
who thought of themselves as Argentinian or South American first and
Italian second. The reasons for this are not clear, although the language
and, as in the case of the United States immigrants, culinary habits were
mentioned.72 This was an especially paradoxical situation because, on the
one hand, the Italianness of the Trentino returners was, first and foremost,
one of regional identity, namely “Trentinness,” and, on the other, the first
migrants who were owed this right of return were sometimes Austrian
subjects. The return migrations in these cases were therefore primarily
departure migrations.
The Italian–Americans conscripted into the American army for the
Sicilian landings had to constantly negotiate between being Italian,
American, and Italian–American, depending on their past, the condi-
tions of war, and government policies. Often Mussolini supporters, these
conscripts had been imprisoned in 1942 in the United States as “enemy
aliens” (just like the Germans and the Japanese). They owed their ability
to commit to the cause to their status as Americans—and therefore as
freedom fighters and supporters of democracy—and to the evolution in
the theater of war. Their Italianness thus became Italian–American Ital-
ianness as it integrated with the vision of a plural American identity that
was made up of a patchwork of immigrant populations, each bringing
their own specific contribution. The soldiers’ Italianness was also begin-
ning to be seen as an asset by the American Government because it could
help troops move more effectively in operations. However, the reality,
as Manoela Patti points out, was a far cry from this vision of a possible
cultural link between the invading troops and the local populations, first,
72 Davide Paolini, Tullio Seppilli, and Alberto Sorbini, Migrazioni e culture alimen-
tari (Foligno: Editoriale Ulbra, 2002); Patrizia La Trecchia, “Identity in the Kitchen:
Creation of Taste and Culinary Memories of an Italian-American Identity,” Italian Amer-
ican 1 (2012): 44–56; Hasia R. Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish
Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013);
Simone Cinotto, The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New
York City (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Simone Cinotto, “La
cucina diasporica: il cibo come segno di identità culturale,” in Storia d’Italia, eds Corti
and Sanfilippo, 653–72.
because this was a war situation and, second, perhaps because the notion
of Italianness had changed considerably after twenty years of Fascist rule.
Giacomo Girardi focuses on the Venetian exiles of the post-1849
period—after the fall of the Republic of Venice—who left for the Levant
(Corfu, Albania), which had been a traditional sphere of influence for
the Serenissima over the centuries. The Italianness that these exiles took
with them was culturally Venetian and politically Italian. Stressing the
broad social diversity of this group of Venetian exiles after the revolu-
tions of 1848, Giacomo Girardi also notes how familiar these places of
refuge—which had been navigated for centuries by composite popula-
tions of fishermen, traders, and travelers, including Venetians—were for
the immigrants. The Italian language was widely used in Corfu. In this
context, it was the political Italianness that these exiles brought with them
that was novel. Indeed, it had as much impact as the politics contributed
by the Greek diaspora, because “a circle of diasporic Italians contributed
to the Ionian national reunification,” which took place in 1864.
While Italianness could be political, it could also be integrated into
technological and scientific exchanges, as was the case in Albania. Pietro
Marubi, a Garibaldian exile and the first to photograph Scutari (which was
situated in Albania at the time), gave rise to a dynasty of photographers
and a magnificent collection.73 However, as Girardi tells us, the exchanges
were not just technological. Marubi, through his choice of subjects and
categories (religious, professional, traditional, etc.), also contributed to
documenting Albania and to creating an Albanian identity.
The contributions grouped together in Part II, “Institutions,” reveal
that the many facets of Italianness were all linked to a fight against the
integration of Italian emigrants abroad and to a form of resistance on the
part of the migrants to the dilution of their cultural background in their
South American, North American, or colonial host societies.74
The local institutions that had emanated from the Italian immigrant
populations and those linked to consular institutions and diplomatic
73 Loïc Chauvin and Christian Raby, Marubi. A Dynasty of Albanian Photographers

(Paris: Écrits de Lumière, 2011).
74 On these questions, see the classic publication on the sociology of immigration
by Jérémy Boissevain, Les Italiens de Montréal: l’adaptation dans une société pluraliste
(Ottawa: Société Historique du Canada, 1971), plus the more recent publication by
Choate, Emigrant Nation.
representatives75 struggled to shield and sometimes even rescue Italian

nationals living abroad from an integration that they considered to be
too fast and dangerous. This was a constant in the history of unified
Italy. Although they varied in intensity depending on the political regime
in question, these struggles undeniably produced broadly similar forms
of allegiance. The institutions transmitted the state’s vision of Italian-
ness as it was at the time. They put forward a version of the fragmented
discourse, which historiography has clearly identified through the salient
features of the patriotic vision (popularized through various means) that
was expounded in the national rhetoric of the Risorgimento.76
On the one hand, these visions of Italianness represented different
aspects of a national narrative that was intrinsically linked to the mass
migratory exodus. Since unification, this exodus had marked the history
of an Italian people who did not behave like a unified nation. The young
Italian state’s desire to maintain a connection with its nationals abroad
was reflected in the Civil Code of 1865 and in the right to nationality
by descent that was maintained in the Nationality Act of 1912.77 On the
other hand, the conceptions of Italianness discussed in the articles in this
section also reveal features that were specific to the migrants’ contexts
of arrival. Moreover, there was a significant plurality of conceptions,
exhibiting certain commonalities and continuities in regard to the vision
that was coming out of Italy (which, while it was certainly undergoing
change, nevertheless conferred a certain uniformity on these represen-
tations of Italianness). These conceptions were all linked to the specific
construction of Italianness that developed according to the exchanges and
encounters taking place within the host societies.
On a cultural level, the promotion of Italianness by the Dante Alighieri
Society in the French protectorate of Tunisia studied by Gabriele Montal-
bano illustrates this construction process as it unfolded at the turn of the
twentieth century. Its most distinctive feature was its association with an
imperial civilizing mission, which had very similar undertones to those
75 Incisa di Camerana, “Diplomazia.”

76 Banti, Sublime madre nostra; Brice, La monarchie.
77 Guido Tintori, “Cittadinanza e politiche di emigrazione nell’Italia liberale e fascista.
Un approfondimento storico,” in Familismo legale. Come (non) diventare italiani, ed.
Giovanna Zincone (Bari-Rome: Laterza, 2006), 107–38; Roberta Clerici, “Il modello di
cittadinanza in Italia: storia e prospettive,” in Modelli di cittadinanza in Europa, ed.
Manuela Martini (Bologna: CLUEB, 2003), 17–30.
resonating from the contemporary discourses surrounding attempts at

Italian colonial expansion (which met with varying degrees of success).78
However, the empire in this case was that of another nation, and the
main question—an eminently diplomatic question but also one that was
perceptible in the field of cultural practices—was how to preserve the
community’s Italianness without it becoming a threat because of its
demographic importance.
As historiography has shown, the turning point, or “la svolta,” came
as a result of the policies of the institutions that supported the Mussolini
regime abroad (the Fasci italiani all’estero) and the extensive Fascistiza-
tion of Italian state institutions in the host countries in the mid-1930s.79
This development was formalized most notably through the systematic
replacement of consular staff80 and the imposition of the Italian language
in all institutional activities from 1937 onward.
Laura Fotia highlights an aspect of this phase that has so far received
little attention. In Argentina, the different institutions promoted not a
homogenous Italianness but rather non-homogeneous and even diver-
gent visions of Italianness under the Fascist regime. In some cases,
there was a real competition not just between public and private institu-
tions but also between individual private institutions and, less obviously,
different public institutions. As a result of mistrust regarding the effec-
tiveness of the Dante Alighieri Society, the Centro di Studi Italiani (the
future Istituto Italiano di Cultura) was founded in 1937 in Buenos
Aires. This was ultimately more successful than the Istituto Argentino di
Cultura Italica (IACI), which had been founded in 1924 as a specifically
Italian–Argentinian institution.
According to Jessica Lee, however, these heterogeneous sets of insti-
tutions managed to come together by mitigating the most indigestible
aspects of the philo-Fascist discourse and win over some communities in
the United States with the rosy picture they painted of how great their
mother country was. Instrumentally speaking, this discourse proved easy
78 Nicolà Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’expansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il

Mulino, 2002).
79 Gentile, “La politica estera del partito fascista”; Franzina and Sanfilippo, Il fascismo
e gli emigrati; Matard-Bonucci, “Enjeux de la diplomatie culturelle fasciste”; Cavarocchi,
Avanguardie.
80 Carlo Tensone Nianza, “Le funzioni consolari nella riforma emigratoria fascista,”
Italia e il mondo 4 (1927): 9–12.
to mobilize in the 1930s, especially in New York and especially at the time
of the proclamation of the empire, although it suddenly dissipated a few
years later.
While the institutions had an autonomous existence beyond the injunc-
tions that were coming out of Italy, they could experience fairly rapid
changes in their policy directions. The policies of these institutions
(including the most prominent) were produced by the men who ran
them. João Fabio Bertonha deftly demonstrates how the social history of
institutions can reveal new information when analyzing diplomatic poli-
cies in the field. The biographies of the prominent political figures of the
Ventottisti, who were integrated into Italy’s ministry of foreign affairs,
illustrate the ability of these men to interpret what Italianness ought to
have become in their minds.
Hence, there was the Fascist Empire with its strong men on the one
side and the communities in all their diversity across the world on the
other. There is no need to contrast European and South American models
to know that local institutions heavily underscored the different varieties
of Fascistization and features of Italianness that were specific to them.
After World War II, the institutional landscape changed dramatically.
However, some idiosyncratic forms of the Italianness that had been
administered abroad remained. Silvia Cassamagnaghi shows how Catholic
institutions that specialized in providing services in the emotive domain of
abortion for Italian–American communities in the United States would, in
some cases, play on the common origin of the adoptive family and their
adopted child by forging some kind of ethnicized version of adoption.
There is no doubt these practices reflected a desire to draw on forms of
identity that were rooted in an ethnocentric conception—albeit a highly
fabricated one—of adoption.
Part III, entitled “Italian Words,” focuses on the language, which is
considered here both as a lexical medium and as a vector for the diffusion
of an Italianness that was constantly being reworked by circular migrations
and influenced by social and political contexts.
As Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro points out in one of the contributions
in this section, it is by no means insignificant that the most important
Italian dictionary of the nineteenth century was the work of a linguist
and writer who was exiled from the Risorgimento, Niccolò Tommaseo.
He was one of the first to put forward, in collaboration with Bernardo
Bellini in 1861, a definition of Italianness.81 As already mentioned, these

exiles (discussed by Delphine Diaz in Part I) played a connective role
in the process of developing Italianness abroad, most notably, according
to Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro, through what they “carried with them
in their suitcases, their words and their culture.” The words referred to
here were those found in Italian literature, which some believed to be the
epitome of pure language. These words were also used in the teachers’
didactic resources. Many of the exiles were in fact teachers (temporarily
at least), like Filippo Manetta, whose migrant history is traced by Béné-
dicte Deschamps. Manetta was the man behind many of the immigration
newspapers published up until the twentieth century, including those with
a political agenda. As Bénédicte Deschamps has pointed out in previous
works, “the part the Italian ethnic media has played across the centuries
cannot be reduced to just the defense of italianità.”82 The press was a
powerful vector both in maintaining links with the country of origin and
in establishing a sense of community belonging,83 which was incidentally
not always nationally based. In the 1920s,84 La Basilicata nel Mondo,
discussed by Gaetano Morese, raised the question once again of how iden-
tities should be linked at different levels in the development of Italianness
in the migration context. While this periodical presented a regionalist
point of view (aiming in particular to counter stereotypes about south-
erners), it did not put this forward in opposition to a national, or even
nationalist, perspective, acknowledging its complacence toward the Fascist
81 Niccolò Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario de la lingua italiana, Torino,

Società Unione Tipografico Editrice, 1861, http://www.tommaseobellini.it and http://
www.dizionario.org/d/index.php?pageurl=italianita).
82 Bénédicte Deschamps, “The Italian Ethnic Press in a Global Perspectice,” in The
Cultures of Italian Migration: Diverse Trajectories and Discrete perspectives, eds Parati
Graziella and Tamburri Anthony Julian (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2011), 76. See also Bénédicte Deschamps, “Echi d’Italia. La Stampa dell’emigrazione,”
in Storia dell’Emigrazione italiana. Arrivi, eds Bevilacqua, De Clementi, and Franzina,
313–34; Histoire de la presse italo-américaine du Risorgimento à la Grande Guerre (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2020).
83 See in particular the following special issues: “La stampa italiana all’estero,” Altre-
italie 35 (2007); “La stampa di emigrazione italiana,” Studi Emigrazione 175 (2009);
“La stampa italiana nel secondo dopoguerra,” Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana
1 (2005).
84 Emilio Fanzina, “Identità regionale, identità nazionale ed emigrazione all’estero,”
in L’identità italiana: emigrazione, immigrazione, conflitti etnici, eds Enzo Bartocci and
Vittorio Cotesta (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1999), 29–46.
regime. Italianness even seemed to dominate when the periodical became

Italiani pel Mondo in 1928.
This press was made for the elite by the elite. The vast majority of
migrants were illiterate, rural people whose vernacular language was not
Italian but one of the countless dialects spoken in the Peninsula. However,
Laura Fournier-Finocchiaro points out that Bruni’s work nuances this
picture by highlighting the fact that a common second language existed
long before 1861, which was already being used by both internal and
external movement populations.85 No doubt in light of this observation,
writers had been aiming, in the tradition of Manzoni and contempo-
rary journalists, to reduce the gap between the written and spoken forms
of Italian since the first half of the nineteenth century. The transition
from oral to written expression is central to Marco Fincardi’s article on
a Po Valley miner’s account of an incident at a Pennsylvania mine at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The account reads like some kind
of palimpsest of the diversity of workers’ dialects, which were seen as
“linguistic baggage.” These dialects mixed with the languages of other
European migrants and the English of the host society. This “language
hybridization,” which was far removed from any academic consideration,
ensured the cohesion of a socioprofessional group and, in this sense,
formed the basis of a non-exclusive Italianness. This was true of many
other Italian diaspora cases in the United States and elsewhere.86
Part IV, entitled “manifestations of Italianness,” compares different
kinds of expressions of Italianness in several contexts.
Anna Pellegrino’s article on the “Italians abroad” collections shown
at international Italian exhibitions in the 1900s focuses on the aims of
these events. For the men in power, who were liberals both economically
and politically, the objective was twofold. They wanted to demonstrate
the benefits of Italian emigration for the country and encourage a
85 Francesco Bruni, L’italiano fuori d’Italia (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2013).

86 See in particular: Nancy C. Carnevale, A New Language, A New World: Italian
Immigrants in the United States, 1890–1945 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
2009); Jean-Charles Vegliante, “La langue des Italiens en France,” in Les Italiens en France
de 1914 à 1940, ed. Pierre Milza, Collection École française de Rome 94 (Paris: Broccard,
1986); Françoise Avenas, “The Role of Ethnic Identity in Language Maintenance and
Language Change: The Case of the Italian Community in France,” Altreitalie 18 (1998).
sense of national belonging by showing works by Italian emigrants.87

Implementing these “Italians abroad” events also required the partici-
pation of expatriates, who would contribute many documents, including
photographs. This gave them the means to feel and demonstrate their
attachment to the mother country.
In her study of the dramatic works staged in São Paulo, Argentina,
Virginia de Almeida Bessa thus shows the role that popular shows played
in the construction and evolution of Italianness. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, when the migrants stood out as conspicuously Italian
in Argentina, they were initially represented as caricatured figures, which
transmitted stereotypes. Their Italianness quickly found expression in the
host country, however. It became unified and then evolved in the 1930s
to embody a brand-new local identity with Italian and Argentine roots.
As Marie Bossaert shows on the subject of the Italian proletariat
emigrating to the Ottoman Empire from the 1860s onward, Italianness
could represent more of an abstract concept than a real sense of belonging
since few immigrants frequented the Italian institutions. However, the
Levantines of Constantinople, whose ancestors had been periodically
leaving the mother country ever since the fifteenth century, demonstrated
their Italianness by practicing the language or attending the Italian mutual
aid society, which was founded in 1863. Finally, in her examination of
the non-Italian communities in the Ottoman Empire (for example, the
Armenians or Albanians) who professed a real attachment to Italy and its
language, culture, and political model, which was a legacy of their stays in
Italy and education in Italian institutions, Marie Bossaert shows that Ital-
ianness extended beyond national identities to bring people together. The
Italian state cultivated this attachment. The Italian consular authorities in
the Ottoman Empire, for example, recruited their officials from both the
Italian and local communities. Nationality and Italianness were two sepa-
rate identities; they were not inter-reducible. Italianness, which is similar
here to the controversial and no doubt too-static notion of Italicity88
87 Patrizia Audenino, “La mostra degli italiani all’estero: prove di nazionalismo,” Storia
in Lombardia 29, no. 1 (2008): 111–24 and “Il lavoro degli italiani all’estero nell’Espo-
sizione internazionale di Torino del 1911,” Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana 7
(2011): 11–17.
88 Giovanni Bechelloni, “Italicity as a cosmopolitan resource,” Matrizes 1 (October
2007), 99–116. Bechelloni extended this concept that was developed by Piero Bassetti in
Globali e locali! Timori e speranze della seconda modernità (Lugano: Casagrande, 2001)
(the cultural link that brings together Italians, descendants of Italians,

and those who express an attachment to Italy), lies more in the demon-
stration of an attachment, which can vary in time and space, to Italy and
its culture than in any biological or national belonging.
Thibault Bechini’s reflection on the official papers that Italians took
with them on their travels or which they were obliged to produce in
Buenos Aires and Marseille (his two fields of study) also shows the
malleability of the notion of Italianness. The careful preservation of a
passport evidences a feeling of being Italian and a desire to appear as
such. Conversely, applications for affidavits to the justice of the peace in
Marseille indicate a break with the country of origin, where ties have
become so weak that no certificate of any kind (birth, marriage, prop-
erty ownership, etc.) can be produced. Between these two extremes, the
various papers preserved or requested by Italian migrants depict the many
nuances of an Italianness that was claimed for a very specific purpose,
namely to assert the emigrants’ rights. This implicitly poses the question
of whether Italianness can be reduced to its paper evidence. Is it not more
about emotions than about administrative evidence?
In short, all the contributions collected in this book provide an oppor-
tunity to compare and contrast different historical and geographical
contexts, giving us a better understanding of this highly abstract notion
of Italianness through points of similarity as well as through nuances
and differences. The book shows that Italianness, when it manifested in
relation to emigration, remained highly politicized by the ruling elites.
However, its meaning varied according to the interests of the state, which
in turn differed from one context to the next. During the periods of unifi-
cation and then of liberal Italy, the main aim was to make emigrants aware
of the fact they all belonged to the same national community. Although
this continued to be a consideration, the emergence of the Mussolini
regime after World War I brought a more ideological dimension to Ital-
ianness in the migrant context because it combined with an adherence to
Fascism and manifested as a component of the imperial expansion project.
In the republican era, the state discourse on the Italianness of migrants
and their descendants became less restrictive and aggressive as it retained
and Italic Identity in Pluralistic Contexts, eds Piero Bassetti and Paolo Janni (Wash-
ington: The Council in Values and Philosophy, CUA, 2004). For a synthesis, see Barbara
Bechelloni, “Italicità.”
from previous periods only foreign policy goals linked to cultural influence
and the development of foreign trade.
Regardless of the period in question, however, the political meaning
of Italianness was based on the valorization of a common culture. Italian-
ness, as an ethnocultural identity, should nevertheless not be conceived
just as some kind of top-down doctrine, because it was also the product
of immigrant civil society action and was lived day to day by “ordinary”
emigrants. The various case studies presented in this book show variations
according to social group, generation, region of origin, and even host
country. It is not easy to establish a stable typology because the determi-
nants intersect, but it is possible to identify a few key elements. From the
point of view of social categories, for example, the elites endeavored in
particular to maintain Italianness through the promotion and use of the
Italian language, while the main manifestations of Italianness among the
working-class majority were religious and gastronomic practices. It is also
clear that for the first generation of emigrants, Italianness was rooted in
regionalized cultures and expressed very distinctly and for the generations
that followed, it shifted between dilution and reinvention. Of course, the
national context of the host societies interfered with the ways in which
Italianness was expressed. While we must be careful here, too, of cate-
gorizations that are overly rigid or indeed artificial based on the level
of assimilationist pressure exerted on immigrant populations, this book
confirms that there were differences between countries with an ancient
national tradition (such as France) and those with a more recent tradition
(notably in North and South America) and that colonial situations should
be given a separate category.
In fact, most of the contributions in the book testify to the fact that
the emigrants’ Italianness was a patchwork of political, cultural, and social
belongings that even the hegemonic propaganda of the Fascist regime
could not manage to unify. In this sense, Italianness appeared in migration
as a mode of coexistence.
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Doubtless Livingston was right in securing his main object at any
cost; but could he have given more time to his claims convention, he
would perhaps have saved his own reputation and that of his
successor from much stain, although he might have gained no more
than he did for his Government. In the two conventions of 1800 and
1803 the United States obtained two objects of the utmost value,—
by the first, a release from treaty obligations which, if carried out,
required war with England; by the second, the whole west bank of
the Mississippi River and the island of New Orleans, with all the
incidental advantages attached. In return for these gains the United
States government promised not to press the claims of its citizens
against the French government beyond the amount of three million
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was one fourth part
of the price paid for Louisiana. The legitimate claims of American
citizens against France amounted to many million dollars; in the
result, certain favored claimants received three million seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars less their expenses, which
reduced the sum about one half.
The impression of diplomatic oversight was deepened by the
scandals which grew out of the distribution of the three million seven
hundred and fifty thousand dollars which the favored claimants were
to receive. Livingston’s diplomatic career was poisoned by quarrels
over this money.[46] That the French government acted with little
concealment of venality was no matter of surprise; but that
Livingston should be officially charged by his own associates with
favoritism and corruption,—“imbecility of mind and a childish vanity,
mixed with a considerable portion of duplicity,”—injured the credit of
his Government; and the matter was not bettered when he threw
back similar charges on the Board of Commissioners, or when at last
General Armstrong, coming to succeed him, was discredited by
similar suspicions. Considering how small was the amount of money
distributed, the scandal and corruption surpassed any other
experience of the national government.
Livingston’s troubles did not end there. He could afford to suffer
some deduction from his triumph; for he had achieved the greatest
diplomatic success recorded in American history. Neither Franklin,
Jay, Gallatin, nor any other American diplomatist was so fortunate as
Livingston for the immensity of his results compared with the paucity
of his means. Other treaties of immense consequence have been
signed by American representatives,—the treaty of alliance with
France; the treaty of peace with England which recognized
independence; the treaty of Ghent; the treaty which ceded Florida;
the Ashburton treaty; the treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo,—but in none
of these did the United States government get so much for so little.
The annexation of Louisiana was an event so portentous as to defy
measurement; it gave a new face to politics, and ranked in historical
importance next to the Declaration of Independence and the
adoption of the Constitution,—events of which it was the logical
outcome; but as a matter of diplomacy it was unparalleled, because
it cost almost nothing.
The scandalous failure of the claims convention was a trifling
drawback to the enjoyment of this unique success; but the success
was further embittered by the conviction that America would give the
honor to Monroe. Virginia was all-powerful. Livingston was
unpopular, distrusted, not liked even by Madison; while Monroe, for
political reasons, had been made a prominent figure. Public attention
had been artificially drawn upon his mission; and in consequence,
Monroe’s name grew great, so as almost to overshadow that of
Madison, while Livingston heard few voices proclaiming his services
to the country. In a few weeks Livingston began to see his laurels
wither, and was forced to claim the credit that he thought his due.
Monroe treated him less generously than he might have done,
considering that Monroe gained the political profit of the success.[47]
Acknowledging that his own share was next to nothing in the
negotiation, he still encouraged the idea that Livingston’s influence
had been equally null. This view was doubtless correct, but if
universally applied in history, would deprive many great men of their
laurels. Monroe’s criticism helped only to diminish the political
chances of a possible rival who had no Virginia behind him to press
his preferment and cover his mistakes.
CHAPTER III.
When Marbois took the treaty to the First Consul, Bonaparte
listened to its provisions with lively interest; and on hearing that
twenty millions were to be employed in paying claims,—a use of
money which he much disliked,—he broke out: “Who authorized you
to dispose of the money of the State? I want to have these twenty
millions paid into the Treasury. The claimants’ rights cannot come
before our own.”[48] His own projet had required the Americans to
assume these claims,—which was, in fact, the better plan. Marbois’s
alteration turned the claims into a French job. Perhaps Bonaparte
was not averse to this; for when Marbois reminded him that he had
himself fixed the price at fifty millions, whereas the treaty gave him
sixty, and settled the claims besides,—“It is true,” he said; “the
negotiation leaves me nothing to wish. Sixty millions for an
occupation that will not perhaps last a day! I want France to have the
good of this unexpected capital, and to employ it in works of use to
her marine.” On the spot he dictated a decree for the construction of
five canals. This excellent use of the money seemed inconsistent
with Lucien’s remark that it was wanted for war,—but the canals
were never built or begun; and the sixty millions were spent, to the
last centime, in preparations for an impracticable descent on
England.
Yet money was not the inducement which caused Bonaparte to
sell Louisiana to the United States. The Prince of Peace would at
any time have given more money, and would perhaps have been
willing, as he certainly was able, to pay it from his private means
rather than allow the United States to own Louisiana. In other
respects, the sale needed explanation, since it contradicted the First
Consul’s political theories and prejudices. He had but two rooted
hatreds. The deeper and fiercer of these was directed against the
republic,—the organized democracy, and what he called ideology,
which Americans knew in practice as Jeffersonian theories; the
second and steadier was his hatred of England as the chief barrier to
his military omnipotence. The cession of Louisiana to the United
States contradicted both these passions, making the ideologists
supreme in the New World, and necessarily tending in the end to
strengthen England in the Old. Bonaparte had been taught by
Talleyrand that America and England, whatever might be their
mutual jealousies, hatreds, or wars, were socially and economically
one and indivisible. Barely ten years after the Revolutionary War had
closed, and at a time when the wounds it made were still raw,
Talleyrand remarked: “In every part of America through which I have
travelled, I have not found a single Englishman who did not feel
himself to be an American; not a single Frenchman who did not find
himself a stranger.” Bonaparte knew that England held the monopoly
of American trade, and that America held the monopoly of
democratic principles; yet he did an act which was certain to extend
British trade and fortify democratic principles.
This contradiction was due to no change in Bonaparte’s opinions;
these remained what they were. At the moment when talking to
Marbois about “those republicans whose friendship I seek,” he was
calculating on the chance that his gift would one day prove their ruin.
“Perhaps it will also be objected to me,” he said,[49] “that the
Americans may in two or three centuries be found too powerful for
Europe; but my foresight does not embrace such remote fears.
Besides, we may hereafter expect rivalries among the members of
the Union. The confederations that are called perpetual last only till
one of the contracting parties finds it to its interest to break them.... It
is to prevent the danger to which the colossal power of England
exposes us that I would provide a remedy.” The colossal power of
England depended on her navy, her colonies, and her manufactures.
Bonaparte proposed to overthrow it by shattering beyond repair the
colonial system of France and Spain; and even this step was
reasonable compared with what followed. He expected to check the
power of England by giving Louisiana to the United States,—a
measure which opened a new world to English commerce and
manufactures, and riveted England’s grasp on the whole American
continent, inviting her to do what she afterward did,—join hands with
the United States in revolutionizing Mexico and South America in her
own interests. As though to render these results certain, after
extending this invitation to English commerce and American
democracy, Bonaparte next invited a war with England, which was
certain to drive from the ocean every ship belonging to France or
Spain,—a war which left even the United States at England’s mercy.
Every detail that could explain Bonaparte’s motives becomes
interesting in a matter so important to American history. Certain
points were clear. Talleyrand’s colonial and peace policy failed.
Resting on the maintenance of order in Europe and the extension of
French power in rivalry with the United States and England in
America, it was a statesmanlike and honorable scheme, which
claimed for the Latin races what Louis XIV. tried to gain for them; but
it had the disadvantage of rousing hostility in the United States, and
of throwing them into the arms of England. For this result Talleyrand
was prepared. He knew that he could keep peace with England, and
that the United States alone could not prevent him from carrying out
his policy. Indeed, Madison in his conversation with Pichon invited
such action, and Jefferson had no means of resisting it; but from the
moment when St. Domingo prevented the success of the scheme,
and Bonaparte gained an excuse for following his own military
instincts, the hostility of the United States became troublesome.
President Jefferson had chiefly reckoned on this possibility as his
hope of getting Louisiana; and slight as the chance seemed, he was
right.
This was, in effect, the explanation which Talleyrand officially
wrote to his colleague Decrès, communicating a copy of the treaty,
and requesting him to take the necessary measures for executing it.
[50]
“The wish to spare the North American continent the war with
which it was threatened, to dispose of different points in dispute
between France and the United States of America, and to remove all
the new causes of misunderstanding which competition and
neighborhood might have produced between them; the position of the
French colonies; their want of men, cultivation, and assistance; in fine,
the empire of circumstances, foresight of the future, and the intention
to compensate by an advantageous arrangement for the inevitable
loss of a country which war was going to put at the mercy of another
nation,—all these motives have determined the Government to pass
to the United States the rights it had acquired from Spain over the
sovereignty and property of Louisiana.”
Talleyrand’s words were always happily chosen, whether to
reveal or to conceal his thoughts. This display of reasons for an act
which he probably preferred to condemn, might explain some of the
First Consul’s motives in ceding Louisiana to the United States; but it
only confused another more perplexing question. Louisiana did not
belong to France, but to Spain. The retrocession had never been
completed; the territory was still possessed, garrisoned, and
administered by Don Carlos IV.; until actual delivery was made,
Spain might yet require that the conditions of retrocession should be
rigorously performed. Her right in the present instance was
complete, because she held as one of the conditions precedent to
the retrocession a solemn pledge from the First Consul never to
alienate Louisiana. The sale of Louisiana to the United States was
trebly invalid: if it were French property, Bonaparte could not
constitutionally alienate it without the consent of the Chambers; if it
were Spanish property, he could not alienate it at all; if Spain had a
right of reclamation, his sale was worthless. In spite of all these
objections the alienation took place; and the motives which led the
First Consul to conciliate America by violating the Constitution of
France were perhaps as simple as he represented them to be; but
no one explained what motives led Bonaparte to break his word of
honor and betray the monarchy of Spain.
Bonaparte’s evident inclination toward a new war with England
greatly distressed King Charles IV. Treaty stipulations bound Spain
either to take part with France in the war, or to pay a heavy annual
subsidy; and Spain was so weak that either alternative seemed fatal.
The Prince of Peace would have liked to join England or Austria in a
coalition against Bonaparte; but he knew that to this last desperate
measure King Charles would never assent until Bonaparte’s hand
was actually on his crown; for no one could reasonably doubt that
within a year after Spain should declare an unsuccessful war on
France, the whole picturesque Spanish court—not only Don Carlos
IV. himself and Queen Luisa, but also the Prince of Peace, Don
Pedro Cevallos, the Infant Don Ferdinand, and the train of courtiers
who thronged La Granja and the Escorial—would be wandering in
exile or wearing out their lives in captivity. To increase the
complication, the young King of Etruria died May 27, 1803, leaving
an infant seated upon the frail throne which was sure soon to
disappear at the bidding of some military order countersigned by
Berthier.
In the midst of such anxieties, Godoy heard a public rumor that
Bonaparte had sold Louisiana to the United States; and he felt it as
the death-knell of the Spanish empire. Between the energy of the
American democracy and the violence of Napoleon whom no oath
bound, Spain could hope for no escape. From New Orleans to Vera
Cruz was but a step; from Bayonne to Cadiz a winter campaign of
some five or six hundred miles. Yet Godoy would probably have
risked everything, and would have thrown Spain into England’s
hands, had he been able to control the King and Queen, over whom
Bonaparte exercised the influence of a master. On learning the sale
of Louisiana, the Spanish government used language almost
equivalent to a rupture with France. The Spanish minister at Paris
was ordered to remonstrate in the strongest terms against the step
which the First Consul had taken behind the back of the King his ally.
[51]
“This alienation,” wrote the Chevalier d’Azara to Talleyrand, “not

only deranges from top to bottom the whole colonial system of Spain,
and even of Europe, but is directly opposed to the compacts and
formal stipulations agreed upon between France and Spain, and to
the terms of the cession in the treaty of Tuscany; and the King my
master brought himself to give up the colony only on condition that it
should at no time, under no pretext, and in no manner, be alienated or
ceded to any other Power.”
Then, after reciting the words of Gouvion St.-Cyr’s pledge, the
note continued:—
“It is impossible to conceive more frankness or loyalty than the
King has put into his conduct toward France throughout this affair. His
Majesty had therefore the right to expect as much on the part of his
ally, but unhappily finds himself deceived in his hopes by the sale of
the said colony. Yet trusting always in the straightforwardness and
justice of the First Consul, he has ordered me to make this
representation, and to protest against the alienation, hoping that it will
be revoked, as manifestly contrary to the treaties and to the most
solemn anterior promises.”
Not stopping there, the note also insisted that Tuscany should be
evacuated by the French troops, who were not needed, and had
become an intolerable burden, so that the country was reduced to
the utmost misery. Next, King Charles demanded that Parma and
Piacenza should be surrendered to the King of Etruria, to whom they
belonged as the heir of the late Duke of Parma. Finally, the note
closed with a complaint even more grave in substance than any of
the rest:—
“The King my master could have wished also a little more friendly
frankness in communicating the negotiations with England, and
especially in regard to the dispositions of the Northern courts,
guarantors of the treaty of Amiens; but as this affair belongs to
negotiations of another kind, the undersigned abstains for the moment
from entering into them, reserving the right to do so on a better
occasion.”
Beurnonville, the French minister at Madrid, tried to soothe or
silence the complaints of Cevallos; but found himself only silenced in
return. The views of the Spanish secretary were energetic, precise,
and not to be met by argument.[52] “I have not been able to bring M.
Cevallos to any moderate, conciliatory, or even calm expression,”
wrote Beurnonville to Talleyrand; “he has persistently shown himself
inaccessible to all persuasion.” The Prince of Peace was no more
manageable than Cevallos: “While substituting a soft and pliant tone
for the sharpest expressions, and presenting under the appearance
of regret what had been advanced to me with the bitterness of
reproach, the difference between the Prince’s conduct and that of M.
Cevallos is one only in words.” Both of them said, what was quite
true, that the United States would not have objected to the continued
possession of Louisiana by Spain, and that France had greatly
exaggerated the dispute about the entrepôt.
“The whole matter reduces itself to a blunder (gaucherie) of the
Intendant,” said Cevallos; “it has been finally explained to Mr.
Jefferson, and friendship is restored. On both sides there has been
irritation, but not a shadow of aggression; and from the moment of
coming to an understanding, both parties see that they are at bottom
of one mind, and mutually very well disposed toward each other.
Moreover, it is quite gratuitous to assume that Louisiana is so easy to
take in the event of a war, either by the Americans or by the English.
The first have only militia,—very considerable, it is true, but few troops
of the line; while Louisiana, at least for the moment, has ten thousand
militia-men, and a body of three thousand five hundred regular troops.
As for the English, they cannot seriously have views on a province
which is impregnable to them; and all things considered, it would be
no great calamity if they should take it. The United States, having a
much firmer hold on the American continent, should they take a new
enlargement, would end by becoming formidable, and would one day
disturb the Spanish possessions. As for the debts due to Americans,
Spain has still more claim to an arrangement of that kind; and in any
case the King, as Bonaparte must know, would have gladly
discharged all the debts contracted by France, and perhaps even a
large instalment of the American claim, in order to recover an old
domain of the crown. Finally, the intention which led the King to give
his consent to the exchange of Louisiana was completely deceived.
This intention had been to interpose a strong dyke between the
Spanish colonies and the American possessions; now, on the
contrary, the doors of Mexico are to stay open to them.”
To these allegations, which Beurnonville called “insincere, weak,
and ill-timed,” Cevallos added a piece of evidence which, strangely
enough, was altogether new to the French minister, and reduced him
to confusion: it was Gouvion St.-Cyr’s letter, pledging the First
Consul never to alienate Louisiana.
When Beurnonville’s despatch narrating these interviews reached
Paris, it stung Bonaparte to the quick, and called from him one of the
angry avowals with which he sometimes revealed a part of the
motives that influenced his strange mind. Talleyrand wrote back to
Beurnonville, June 22, a letter which bore the mark of the First
Consul’s hand.
“In one of my last letters,” he began,[53] “I made known to you the
motives which determined the Government to give up Louisiana to the
United States. You will not conceal from the Court of Madrid that one
of the causes which had most influence on this determination was
discontent at learning that Spain, after having promised to sustain the
measures taken by the Intendant of New Orleans, had nevertheless
formally revoked them. These measures would have tended to free
the capital of Louisiana from subjection to a right of deposit which was
becoming a source of bickerings between the Louisianians and
Americans. We should have afterward assigned to the United States,
in conformity to their treaty with Spain, another place of deposit, less
troublesome to the colony and less injurious to its commerce; but
Spain put to flight all these hopes by confirming the privileges of the
Americans at New Orleans,—thus granting them definitively local
advantages which had been at first only temporary. The French
government, which had reason to count on the contrary assurance
given in this regard by that of Spain, had a right to feel surprise at this
determination; and seeing no way of reconciling it with the commercial
advantages of the colony and with a long peace between the colony
and its neighbors, took the only course which actual circumstances
and wise prevision could suggest.”
These assertions contained no more truth than those which
Cevallos had answered. Spain had not promised to sustain the
Intendant, nor had she revoked the Intendant’s measures after, but
before, the imagined promise; she had not confirmed the American
privileges at New Orleans, but had expressly reserved them for
future treatment. On the other hand, the restoration of the deposit
was not only reconcilable with peace between Louisiana and the
United States, but the whole world knew that the risk of war rose
from the threat of disturbing the right of deposit. The idea that the
colony had become less valuable on this account was new. France
had begged for the colony with its American privileges, and meaning
to risk the chances of American hostility; but if these privileges were
the cause of selling the colony to the Americans, and if, as
Talleyrand implied, France could and would have held Louisiana if
the right of deposit at New Orleans had been abolished and the
Americans restricted to some other spot on the river-bank, fear of
England was not, as had been previously alleged, the cause of the
sale. Finally, if the act of Spain made the colony worthless, why was
Spain deprived of the chance to buy it back?
The answer was evident. The reason why Bonaparte did not
keep his word to Don Carlos IV. was that he looked on Spain as his
own property, and on himself as representing her sovereignty. The
reasons for which he refused to Spain the chance to redeem the
colony, were probably far more complicated. The only obvious
explanation, assuming that he still remembered his pledge, was a
wish to punish Spain.
After all these questions were asked, one problem still remained.
Bonaparte had reasons for not returning the colony to Spain; he had
reasons, too, for giving it to the United States,—but why did he
alienate the territory from France? Fear of England was not the true
cause. He had not to learn how to reconquer Louisiana on the
Danube and the Po. At one time or another Great Britain had
captured nearly all the French colonies in the New World, and had
been forced not only to disgorge conquests, but to abandon
possessions; until of the three great European Powers in America,
England was weakest. Any attempt to regain old ascendency by
conquering Louisiana would have thrown the United States into the
hands of France; and had Bonaparte anticipated such an act, he
should have helped it. That Great Britain should waste strength in
conquering Louisiana in order to give it to the United States, was an
idea not to be gravely argued. Jefferson might, indeed, be driven into
an English alliance in order to take Louisiana by force from France or
Spain; but this danger was slight in itself, and might have been
removed by the simple measure of selling only the island of New
Orleans, and by retaining the west bank, which Jefferson was ready
to guarantee. This was the American plan; and the President offered
for New Orleans alone about half the price he paid for all Louisiana.
[54] Still, Bonaparte forced the west bank on Livingston. Every
diplomatic object would have been gained by accepting Jefferson’s
projet of a treaty, and signing it without the change of a word. Spain
would have been still in some degree protected; England would have
been tempted to commit the mistake of conquering the retained
territory, and thereby the United States would have been held in
check; the United States would have gained all the stimulus their
ambition could require for many years to come; and what was more
important to Bonaparte, France could not justly say that he had
illegally and ignobly sold national territory except for a sufficient and
national object.
The real reasons which induced Bonaparte to alienate the
territory from France remained hidden in the mysterious processes
of his mind. Perhaps he could not himself have given the true
explanation of his act. Anger with Spain and Godoy had a share in it,
as he avowed through Talleyrand’s letter of June 22; disgust for the
sacrifices he had made, and impatience to begin his new campaigns
on the Rhine,—possibly a wish to show Talleyrand that his policy
could never be revived, and that he had no choice but to follow into
Germany,—had still more to do with the act. Yet it is also reasonable
to believe that the depths of his nature concealed a wish to hide
forever the monument of a defeat. As he would have liked to blot
Corsica, Egypt, and St. Domingo from the map, and wipe from
human memory the record of his failures, he may have taken
pleasure in flinging Louisiana far off, and burying it forever from the
sight of France in the bosom of the only government which could
absorb and conceal it.
For reasons of his own, which belonged rather to military and
European than to American history, Bonaparte preferred to deal with
Germany before crossing the Pyrenees; and he knew that
meanwhile Spain could not escape. Godoy on his side could neither
drag King Charles into a war with France, nor could he provide the
means of carrying on such a war with success. Where strong nations
like Austria, Russia, and Prussia were forced to crouch before
Bonaparte, and even England would have been glad to accept
tolerable terms, Spain could not challenge attack. The violent anger
that followed the sale of Louisiana and the rupture of the peace of
Amiens soon subsided. Bonaparte, aware that he had outraged the
rights of Spain, became moderate. Anxious to prevent her from
committing any act of desperation, he did not require her to take part
in the war, but even allowed her stipulated subsidies to run in
arrears; and although he might not perhaps regret his sale of
Louisiana to the United States, he felt that he had gone too far in
shaking the colonial system. At the moment when Cevallos made his
bitterest complaints, Bonaparte was least disposed to resent them by
war. Both parties knew that so far as Louisiana was concerned, the
act was done and could not be undone; that France was bound to
carry out her pledge, or the United States would take possession of
Louisiana without her aid. Bonaparte was willing to go far in the way
of conciliation, if Spain would consent to withdraw her protest.
Of this the American negotiators knew little. Through such
complications, of which Bonaparte alone understood the secret, the
Americans moved more or less blindly, not knowing enemies from
friends. The only public man who seemed ever to understand
Napoleon’s methods was Pozzo di Borgo, whose ways of thought
belonged to the island society in which both had grown to manhood;
and Monroe was not skilled in the diplomacy of Pozzo, or even of
Godoy. Throughout life, Monroe was greatly under the influence of
other men. He came to Paris almost a stranger to its new society, for
his only relations of friendship had been with the republicans, most
of whom Bonaparte had sent to Cayenne. He found Livingston
master of the situation, and wisely interfered in no way with what
Livingston did. The treaty was no sooner signed than he showed his
readiness to follow Livingston further, without regard to
embarrassments which might result.
When Livingston set his name to the treaty of cession, May 2,
1803, he was aware of the immense importance of the act. He rose
and shook hands with Monroe and Marbois. “We have lived long,”
said he; “but this is the noblest work of our lives.” This was said by
the man who in the Continental Congress had been a member of the
committee appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence; and it
was said to Monroe, who had been assured only three months
before, by President Jefferson of the grandeur of his destinies in
words he could hardly have forgotten:[55] “Some men are born for
the public. Nature, by fitting them for the service of the human race
on a broad scale, has stamped them with the evidences of her
destination and their duty.” Monroe was born for the public, and
knew what destiny lay before him; while in Livingston’s mind New
York had thenceforward a candidate for the Presidency whose
claims were better than Monroe’s. In the cup of triumph of which
these two men then drank deep, was yet one drop of acid. They had
been sent to buy the Floridas and New Orleans. They had bought
New Orleans; but instead of Florida, so much wanted by the
Southern people, they had paid ten or twelve million dollars for the
west bank of the Mississippi. The negotiators were annoyed to think
that having been sent to buy the east bank of the Mississippi, they
had bought the west bank instead; that the Floridas were not a part
of their purchase. Livingston especially felt the disappointment, and
looked about him for some way to retrieve it.
Hardly was the treaty signed, when Livingston found what he
sought. He discovered that France had actually bought West Florida
without knowing it, and had sold it to the United States without being
paid for it. This theory, which seemed at first sight preposterous,
became a fixed idea in Livingston’s mind. He knew that West Florida
had not been included by Spain in the retrocession, but that on the
contrary Charles IV. had repeatedly, obstinately, and almost publicly
rejected Bonaparte’s tempting bids for that province. Livingston’s
own argument for the cession of Louisiana had chiefly rested on this
knowledge, and on the theory that without Mobile New Orleans was
worthless. He recounted this to Madison in the same letter which
announced Talleyrand’s offer to sell:[56]—
“I have used every exertion with the Spanish Ambassador and
Lord Whitworth to prevent the transfer of the Floridas, ... and unless
they [the French] get Florida, I have convinced them that Louisiana is
worth little.”
In the preceding year one of the French ministers had applied to
Livingston “to know what we understand in America by Louisiana;”
and Livingston’s answer was on record in the State Department at
Washington:[57] “Since the possession of the Floridas by Britain and
the treaty of 1762, I think there can be no doubt as to the precise
meaning of the terms.” He had himself drafted an article which he
tried to insert in Marbois’s projet, pledging the First Consul to
interpose his good offices with the King of Spain to obtain the
country east of the Mississippi. As late as May 12, Livingston wrote
to Madison:[58] “I am satisfied that ... if they [the French] could have
concluded with Spain, we should also have had West Florida.” In his
next letter, only a week afterward, he insisted that West Florida was
his:[59]—
“Now, sir, the sum of this business is to recommend to you in the
strongest terms, after having obtained the possession that the French
commissary will give you, to insist upon this as a part of your right,
and to take possession at all events to the River Perdido. I pledge
myself that your right is good.”
The reasoning on which he rested this change of opinion was in
substance the following: France had, in early days, owned nearly all
the North American continent, and her province of Louisiana had
then included Ohio and the watercourses between the Lakes and the
Gulf, as well as West Florida, or a part of it. This possession lasted
until the treaty of peace, Nov. 3, 1762, when France ceded to
England not only Canada, but also Florida and all other possessions
east of the Mississippi, except the Island of New Orleans. Then West
Florida by treaty first received its modern boundary at the Iberville.
On the same day France further ceded to Spain the Island of New
Orleans and all Louisiana west of the Mississippi. Not a foot of the
vast French possessions on the continent of North America
remained in the hands of the King of France; they were divided
between England and Spain.
The retrocession of 1800 was made on the understanding that it
referred to this cession of 1762. The province of Louisiana which had
been ceded was retro-ceded, with its treaty-boundary at the Iberville.
Livingston knew that the understanding between France and Spain
was complete; yet on examination he found that it had not been
expressed in words so clearly but that these words could be made to
bear a different meaning. Louisiana was retroceded, he perceived,
“with the same extent that it now has in the hands of Spain, and that
it had when France possessed it, and such as it should be according
to the treaties subsequently entered into between Spain and other
States.” When France possessed Louisiana it included Ohio and
West Florida: no one could deny that West Florida was in the hands
of Spain; therefore Bonaparte, in the absence of negative proof,
might have claimed West Florida, if he had been acute enough to
know his own rights, or willing to offend Spain,—and as all
Bonaparte’s rights were vested in the United States, President
Jefferson was at liberty to avail himself of them.
The ingenuity of Livingston’s idea was not to be disputed; and as
a ground for a war of conquest it was as good as some of the claims
which Bonaparte made the world respect. As a diplomatic weapon,
backed as Napoleon would have backed it by a hundred thousand
soldiers, it was as effective an instrument as though it had every
attribute of morality and good faith; and all it wanted, as against
Spain, was the approval of Bonaparte. Livingston hoped that after
the proof of friendship which Bonaparte had already given in selling
Louisiana to the United States, he might without insuperable difficulty
be induced to grant this favor. Both Marbois and Talleyrand, under
the First Consul’s express orders, led him on. Marbois did not deny
that Mobile might lie in Louisiana, and Talleyrand positively denied
knowledge that Laussat’s instructions contained a definition of
boundaries. Bonaparte stood behind both these agents, telling them
that if an obscurity did not exist about the boundary they should
make one. Talleyrand went so far as to encourage the pretensions
which Livingston hinted: “You have made a noble bargain for
yourselves,” said he, “and I suppose you will make the most of it.”
This was said at the time when Bonaparte was still intent on
punishing Spain.
Livingston found no difficulty in convincing Monroe that they had
bought Florida as well as Louisiana.[60]
“We consider ourselves so strongly founded in this conclusion, that
we are of opinion the United States should act on it in all the
measures relative to Louisiana in the same manner as if West Florida
was comprised within the Island of New Orleans, or lay to the west of
the River Iberville.”
Livingston expected that “a little force,”[61] as he expressed

himself, might be necessary.
“After the explanations that have been given here, you need
apprehend nothing from a decisive measure; your minister here and at
Madrid can support your claim, and the time is peculiarly favorable to
enable you to do it without the smallest risk at home.... The moment is
so favorable for taking possession of that country that I hope it has not
been neglected, even though a little force should be necessary to
effect it. Your minister must find the means to justify it.”
A little violence added to a little diplomacy would answer the
purpose. To use the words which “Aristides” Van Ness was soon to
utter with striking effect, the United States ministers to France
“practised with unlimited success upon the Livingston maxim,—
‘Rem facias, rem
Si possis recte; si non, quocunque modo, rem.’”
CHAPTER IV.
In the excitement of this rapid and half-understood foreign drama,
domestic affairs seemed tame to the American people, who were
busied only with the routine of daily life. They had set their
democratic house in order. So short and easy was the task, that the
work of a single year finished it. When the President was about to
meet Congress for the second time, he had no new measures to
offer.[62] “The path we have to pursue is so quiet that we have
nothing scarcely to propose to our legislature.” The session was too
short for severe labor. A quorum was not made until the middle of
December, 1802; the Seventh Congress expired March 4, 1803. Of
these ten weeks, a large part was consumed in discussions of
Morales’s proclamation and Bonaparte’s scheme of colonizing
Louisiana.
On one plea the ruling party relied as an excuse for inactivity and
as a defence against attack. Their enemies had said and believed
that the democrats possessed neither virtue nor ability enough to
carry on the government; but after eighteen months of trial, as the
year 1803 began, the most severe Federalist could not with truth
assert that the country had yet suffered in material welfare from the
change. Although the peace in Europe, after October, 1801, checked
the shipping interests of America, and although France and Spain,
returning to the strictness of their colonial system, drove the
American flag from their harbors in the Antilles, yet Gallatin at the
close of the first year of peace was able to tell Congress[63] that the
customs revenue, which he had estimated twelve months before at
$9,500,000, had brought into the Treasury $12,280,000, or much
more than had ever before been realized in a single year from all
sources of revenue united. That the Secretary of the Treasury should
miscalculate by one third the product of his own taxes was strange;
but Gallatin liked to measure the future, not by a probable mean, but
by its lowest possible extreme, and his chief aim was to check
extravagance in appropriations for objects which he thought bad. His
caution increased the popular effect of his success. Opposition

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Italianness and Migration from the

Risorgimento to the 1960s 1st ed. 2022

More information about this series at

Manuela Martini Catherine Brice

Palgrave Studies in Migration History

Cover illustration: © Bettina Strenske/Alamy Stock Photo

This book is based on a selection of some papers presented at an

(Queens College, City of New York University), Benjamin Stora (Musée

So Many Italies in so Many Suitcases 1

Italians Through Their Travels

Virginia de Almeida Bessa is collaborating professor in the Institute of

(La monarchie et la construction de l’identité nationale italienne (1861–

In 2020, she published a history of the Italian-American press from the

between Argentina, United States, and Italy; transitional justice, human

de France. She belongs to numerous scientific organizations and advi-

The Risorgimento Italians’ Journeys and Exile Narratives

The Italianization of the Italian–American and Fascism’s

From the Local Identity of Basilicata Nel Mondo to the

Fig. 2 Italiani pel Mondo, n. 1, 1928 (Source Biblioteca

“Bread Denied by the Nation” the Italians Abroad

Fig. 1 The Italians Abroad Exhibitions Pavillion in Milan 1906.

When the Italians Came on the Scene: Immigration and

Stéphane Mourlane, Céline Regnard, Manuela Martini,

There is a paradox in the history of modern Italy. Italian unification, a

S. Mourlane (B) · C. Regnard

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

1 Manuela Martini, “Migrazioni: communità e nazione,” Memoria e Ricerca 8 (1996):

7 For a global historiographical approach, see in particular: Donna Gabaccia, “Italian

even of permanent returns,12 which accounted for around half of those

were contributing, in accordance with their location, to an ever-changing

19 Maddalena Tirabassi, “Transnazionalismo, diaspora, generazioni e migrazioni ital-

rifiuterebbe.) Con tale titolo, spererei di richiamare l’attenzione su tematiche di differenza

32 Martini, “Migrazioni,” 7; Corti, Temi e problemi, 95; Amalia Signorelli, “Dal-

tensions linked to competition at the economic level.38 Some elemental

often delegated to institutions like the Dante Alighieri Society,46 the

supported associative activity abroad, it combined with renewed refer-

reinvented with a boom in the number of new Italian emigrants, who

65 Matteo Sanfilippo, “La nuova emigrazione italiana (2000–2017): il quadro storico e

73 Loïc Chauvin and Christian Raby, Marubi. A Dynasty of Albanian Photographers

representatives75 struggled to shield and sometimes even rescue Italian

75 Incisa di Camerana, “Diplomazia.”

resonating from the contemporary discourses surrounding attempts at

78 Nicolà Labanca, Oltremare. Storia dell’expansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il

Bellini in 1861, a definition of Italianness.81 As already mentioned, these

81 Niccolò Tommaseo and Bernardo Bellini, Dizionario de la lingua italiana, Torino,

regime. Italianness even seemed to dominate when the periodical became

85 Francesco Bruni, L’italiano fuori d’Italia (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2013).

sense of national belonging by showing works by Italian emigrants.87

(the cultural link that brings together Italians, descendants of Italians,

“This alienation,” wrote the Chevalier d’Azara to Talleyrand, “not

Livingston expected that “a little force,”[61] as he expressed

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