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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
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Bettina Strenske/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 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.
4 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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.
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 5

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
6 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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.
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 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).
8 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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).
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 9

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.
10 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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).
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 11

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.
12 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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).
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 13

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).
14 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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.
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 15

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.
16 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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.
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 17

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.
18 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 19

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.
20 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

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).
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 21

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)
22 S. MOURLANE ET AL.

(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.”
 SO MANY ITALIES IN SO MANY SUITCASES 23

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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decorative. Meditative oxen, drawing a primitive plough made of a
pointed stick, loosen the soil for the new planting, and tiny green
wheat-shoots, first of the three regular crops of the year, wait for the
warm winter sun that opens the plum-blossoms.
Above and beyond Sugita is Minë, a temple on a mountain-top,
with a background of dense pine forest, a foreground of bamboos,
and an old priest, whose successful use of the moxa brings sufferers
from long distances for treatment. A bridle-path follows for several
miles the knife-edge of a ridge commanding noble views of sea and
shore, of the blue Hakone range, its great sentinel Oyama, and Fuji
beyond. The high ridge of Minë is the backbone of a great
promontory running out into the sea, the Bay of Yeddo on one side
and Odawara Bay on the other. Square sails of unnumbered fishing-
boats fleck the blue horizon, and the view seaward is unbroken.
Over an old race-course and archery-range of feudal days the path
leads, till at a sudden turn it strikes into a pine forest, where the
horses’ hoofs fall noiseless on thick carpets of dry pine-needles, and
the cave-like twilight, coolness, and stillness seem as solemn as in
that wood where Virgil and Dante walked, before they visited the
circles of the other world.
A steep plunge down a slippery, clayey trail takes the rider from
the melancholy darkness to a solitary forest clearing, with low temple
buildings on one side. Here, massed against feathery fronds of giant
bamboos, blaze boughs of fine-leafed maples, all vivid crimson to
the tips. While the priests bring saké tubs, and the amado, or outside
shutters of their house, to make a table, and improvise benches with
various temple and domestic properties, visitors may wander through
the forest to open spaces, whence all the coasts of the two bays and
every valley of the province lie visible, and a column of smoke
proclaims the living volcano on Oshima’s island, far down the coast.
Groups of cheery pilgrims come chattering down from the forest,
untie their sandals, wash their feet, and disappear within the temple;
where the old priest writes sacred characters on their bared backs to
indicate where his attendant shall place the lumps of sticky moxa
dough. Another attendant goes down the line of victims and touches
a light to these cones, which burn with a slow, red glow, and hiss and
smoke upon the flesh for agonizing seconds. The priest reads pious
books and casts up accounts, while the patients endure without a
groan tortures compared with which the searing with the white-hot
irons of Parisian moxa treatment is comfortable. The Minë priest has
some secret of composition for his moxa dough which has kept it in
favor for many years, and almost the only revenue of the temple is
derived from this source. Rheumatism, lumbago, and paralysis yield
to the moxa treatment, and the Japanese resort to it for all their
aches and ills, the coolies’ backs and legs being often finely
patterned with its scars.
The prospect from Minë’s promontory is rivalled by that at
Kanozan, directly across the Bay, one of the highest points on the
long tongue of separating land. Here are splendid old temples,
almost unvisited by foreigners, but the glory of the place is the view
of the ninety-nine valleys, of Yeddo Bay, the ocean, and the ever-
dominant Fujiyama. Every Japanese knows the famous landscapes
of his country, and the mention of these ninety-nine valleys and the
thousand pine-clad islands of Matsuyama brings a light to his eyes.
At Yokosuka, fifteen miles below Yokohama, are the Government
arsenal, navy-yard, and dry docks, with their fleets of war-ships that
put to shame the American squadron in Asiatic waters. The
Japanese Government has both constructed and bought a navy;
some vessels coming from Glasgow yards, and others having been
built at these docks.
Uraga, reached from Yokosuka by a winding, Cornice-like road
along the coast, is doubly notable as being the port off which
Commodore Perry’s ships first anchored, and the place where midzu
ame, or millet honey, is made. The whole picturesque, clean little
town is given up to the production of the amber sweet, and there are
certain families whose midzu ame has not varied in excellence for
more than three hundred years. The rice, or millet, is soaked,
steamed, mixed with warm water and barley malt, and left to stand a
few hours, when a clear yellow liquid is drawn off and boiled down to
a thick syrup or paste, or cooked until it can be moulded into hard
balls. Unaffected by weather, it is the best of Japanese sweets, and
in its semiliquid stage is twisted out on chopsticks at all seasons of
the year. The older and browner the midzu ame is, the better. It may
be called the apotheosis of butter-scotch, a glorified Oriental taffy,
constantly urged upon one for one’s own good, and conceded by
foreign physicians in Japan to be of great value for dyspeptics and
consumptives. Though prepared all over the empire, this curative
sweet is the specialty of Uraga; and the secrets and formulas held in
the old families make for Uraga midzu ame, as compared with other
productions, a reputation akin to that of the Grande Chartreuse, or
Schloss Johannisberger, among other cordials or wines. Street
artists mould midzu ame paste, and blow it with a pipe into myriad
fantastic shapes for their small patrons; while at the greatest
banquets, and even on the Emperor’s table, it appears in the fanciful
flowers that decorate every feast.
 CHAPTER V
KAMAKURA AND ENOSHIMA

The contemporary Yankee might anticipate the sage reflections of

the future New Zealander on London Bridge were there left enough
ruins of the once great city of Kamakura to sit upon; but the military
capital of the Middle Ages has melted away into rice fields and millet
patches. One must wrestle seriously with the polysyllabic guide-book
stories of the shoguns, regents, and heroes who made the glory of
Kamakura, and attracted to it a population of five hundred thousand,
to repeople these lonely tracts with the splendid military pageants of
which they were the scene.
The plain of Kamakura is a semicircle, bounded by hills and facing
the open Pacific, the surf pounding on its long yellow beach between
two noble promontories. The Dai Butsu, the great bronze image of
Buddha, which has kept Kamakura from sinking entirely into
obscurity during the centuries of its decay, stands in a tiny valley a
half-mile back from the shore. The Light of Asia is seated on the
lotus flower, his head bent forward in meditation, his thumbs joined,
and his face wearing an expression of the most benignant calm. This
is one of the few great show-pieces in Japan that is badly placed and
lacks a proper approach. Seen, like the temple gate-ways and
pagodas of Nikko, at the end of a long avenue of trees, or on some
height silhouetted against the sky, Dai Butsu (Great Buddha) would
be far more imposing. Within the image is a temple forty-nine feet in
height; and through an atmosphere thick with incense may be read
the chalked names of ambitious tourists, who have evaded the
priests and left their signatures on the irregular bronze walls. An
alloy of tin and a little gold is mingled with the copper, and on the
joined thumbs and hands, over which visitors climb to sit for their
photographs, the bronze is polished enough to show its fine dark tint.
The rest of the statue is dull and weather-stained, its rich incrustation
disclosing the seams where the huge sections were welded together.
A pretty landscape-garden, banks of blossoming plum-trees, and
the usual leper at the gate-way furnish the accustomed temple
accessories, and Buddha broods and meditates serene in his quiet
sanctuary. The photographic skill of the priest brings a good revenue
to the temple, and a fund is being slowly raised for building a huge
pavilion above the great deity, like that which stood there three
hundred years ago. During his six centuries of holy contemplation at
Kamakura, Dai Butsu has endured many disasters. Earthquakes
have made him nod and sway on the lotus pedestal, and tidal waves
have twice swept over and destroyed the sheltering temple, the great
weight and thickness of the bronze keeping the statue itself
unharmed.
Kamakura is historic ground, and each shrine has its legends. The
great temple of Hachiman, the God of War, remains but as a
fragment of its former self, the buildings standing at the head of a
high stone-embanked terrace, from which a broad avenue of trees
runs straight to the sea, a mile and a half away. Here are the tomb of
Yoritomo and the cave tombs of his faithful Satsuma and Chosen
Daimios; and the priests guard sacredly the sword of Yoritomo, that
of Hachiman himself, the helmet of Iyeyasu, and the bow of Iyemitsu.
In the spring, Kamakura is a delightful resort, on whose dazzling
beach climate and weather are altogether different from those of
Yokohama or Tokio. In summer-time, the steady south wind, or
monsoon, blows straight from the ocean, and the pine grove
between the hotel and shore is musical all day long with the pensive
sough of its branches. In winter it is open and sunny, and the hot
sea-water baths, the charming walks and sails, the old temples and
odd little villages, attract hosts of visitors.
On bright spring mornings men, women, and children gather sea-
weed and spread it to dry on the sand, after which it is converted into
food as delicate as our Iceland moss. Both farmers and fishermen
glean this salty harvest, and after a storm, whole families collect the
flotsam and jetsam of kelp and sea-fronds. Barelegged fisher-
maidens, with blue cotton kerchiefs tied over their heads, and
baskets on their backs, roam along the shore; children dash in and
out of the frothing waves, and babies roll contentedly in the sand;
men and boys wade knee-deep in the water, and are drenched by
the breakers all day long, with the mercury below 50°, in spite of the
warm, bright sun. Women separate the heaps of sea-weed, and at
intervals regale their dripping lords with cups of hot tea, bowls of
rice, and shredded fish. It is all so gay and beautiful, every one is so
merry and happy, that Kamakura life seems made up of rejoicing and
abundance, with no darker side.
The poor in Japan are very poor, getting comparative comfort out
of smaller means than any other civilized people in the world. A few
cotton garments serve for all seasons alike. The cold winds of winter
nip their bare limbs and pierce their few thicknesses of cloth, and the
fierce heat of summer torments them; but they endure these
extremes with stoical good-nature, and enjoy their lovely spring and
autumn the more. A thatched roof, a straw mat, and a few cotton
wadded futons, or comforters, afford the Japanese laborer shelter,
furniture, and bedding, while rice, millet, fish, and sea-weed
constitute his food. With three crops a year growing in his fields, the
poor farmer supports his family on a patch of land forty feet square;
and with three hundred and sixty varieties of food fish swimming in
Japanese waters, the fisherman need not starve. Perfect cleanliness
of person and surroundings is as much an accompaniment of
poverty as of riches.
Beyond Kamakura’s golden bow lies another beach—the strand of
Katase, at the end of which rises Enoshima, the Mont St. Michel of
the Japanese coast. Enoshima is an island at high tide, rising
precipitously from the sea on all sides save to the landward, where
the precipice front is cleft with a deep wooded ravine, that runs out
into the long tongue of sand connecting with the shore at low tide.
Like every other island of legendary fame, Enoshima rose from the
sea in a single night. Its tutelary genius is the goddess Benten, one
of the seven household deities of good-fortune. She is worshipped in
temples and shrines all over the woody summit of the island, and in
a deep cave opening from the sea. Shady paths, moss-grown
terraces, and staircases abound, and little tea-houses and tateba
offer seats, cheering cups of tea, and enchanting views. The near
shores, the limitless waters of the Pacific, and the grand sweep of
Odawara Bay afford the finest setting for Fujiyama anywhere to be
enjoyed.
Enoshima’s crest is a very Forest of Arden, an enchanted place of
lovely shade. The sloping ravine which gives access to it holds only
the one street, or foot-path, lined with tea-houses and shell-shops,
all a-flutter with pilgrim flags and banners. The shells are cut into
whistles, spoons, toys, ornaments, and hair-pins; and tiny pink ones
of a certain variety form the petals of most perfect cherry blossoms,
which are fastened to natural branches and twigs.
The fish dinners of Enoshima are famous, and the Japanese, who
have the genius of cookery, provide more delicious fish dishes than
can be named. At the many tateba set up in temple yards or
balanced on the edges of precipices, conch-shells, filled with a black
stew like terrapin, simmer over charcoal fires. This concoction has a
tempting smell, and the pilgrims, who pick at the inky morsels with
their chopsticks, seem to enjoy it; but in the estimation of the
foreigner it adds one more to the list of glutinous, insipid
preparations with which the Japanese cuisine abounds. The great
marine curiosity of Enoshima is the giant crab, with its body as large
as a turtle, and claws measuring ten, and even twelve, feet from tip
to tip. These crustaceans are said to promenade the beach at night,
and glare with phosphorescent eyes. Another interesting Japanese
crab, the Doryppe Japonica, comes more often from the Inland Sea.
A man’s face is distinctly marked on the back of the shell, and, as
the legend avers, these creatures incarnate the souls of the faithful
samurai, who, following the fortunes of the Tairo clan, were driven
into the sea by the victorious Minamoto. At certain anniversary
seasons, well known to true believers, the spirits of these dead
warriors come up from the sea by thousands and meet together on a
moonlit beach.
Enoshima must have become the favorite summer resort of the
region, had not the whole island been reserved as an imperial
demesne and site for a sea-shore palace. When typhoons rage or
storms sweep in from the ocean, billows ring the island round with
foam, spray dashes up to the drooping foliage on the summit, the air
is full of the wild breath and wilder roar of the breakers, while the
very ground seems to tremble. The underground shrine of Benten is
then closed to worshippers, and looking down the sheer two hundred
feet of rock, one sees only the whirl and rage of waters that hide the
entrance. When these storms rage, visitors are sometimes
imprisoned for days upon the island. At low tide and in ordinary seas
Benten’s shrine is easily entered by a ledge of rocks, the hard thing
being the climb up the long stone stair-ways to the top of the island
again. Guides are numerous, and an old man or a small boy
generally attaches himself to a company of strangers, and is so
friendly, polite, and amiable, that, after escorting it unbidden round
the island, he generally wins his cause, and is bidden to maru maru
(go sight-seeing) as escort and interpreter.
 CHAPTER VI
TOKIO

The first view of Tokio, like the first view of Yokohama, disappoints
the traveller. The Ginza, or main business street, starting from the
bridge opposite the station, goes straight to Nihombashi, the
northern end of the Tokaido, and the recognized centre of the city,
from which all distances are measured. Most of the road-way is lined
with conventional houses of foreign pattern, with their curb-stones
and shade-trees, while the tooting tram-car and the rattling basha, or
light omnibus, emphasize the incongruities of the scene. This is not
the Yeddo of one’s dreams, nor yet is it an Occidental city. Its stucco
walls, wooden columns, glaring shop-windows, and general air of
tawdry imitation fairly depress one. In so large a city there are many
corners, however, which the march of improvement has not reached,
odd, unexpected, and Japanese enough to atone for the rest.
Through the heart of Tokio winds a broad spiral moat, encircling
the palace in its innermost ring, and reaching, by canal branches, to
the river on its outer lines. In feudal days the Shogun’s castle
occupied the inner ring, and within the outer rings were the yashikis,
or spread-out houses, of his daimios. Each gate-way and angle of
the moat was defended by towers, and the whole region was an
impregnable camp. Every daimio in the empire had his yashiki in
Tokio, where he was obliged to spend six months of each year, and
in case of war to send his family as pledges of his loyalty to the
Shogun. The Tokaido and the other great highways of the empire
were always alive with the trains of these nobles, and from this
migratory habit was developed the passion for travel and excursion
that animates every class of the Japanese people. When the
Emperor came up from Kioto and made Tokio his capital, the
Shogun’s palace became his home, and all the Shogun’s property
reverted to the crown, the yashikis of the daimios being confiscated
for government use. In the old days the barrack buildings
surrounding the great rectangle of the yashiki were the outer walls,
protected by a small moat, and furnished with ponderous, gable-
roofed gate-ways, drawbridges, sally-ports, and projecting windows
for outlooks. These barracks accommodated the samurai, or
soldiers, attached to each daimio, and within their lines were the
parade ground and archery range, the residence of the noble family,
and the homes of the artisans in his employ. With the new
occupation many yashiki buildings were razed to the ground, and
imposing edifices in foreign style erected for government offices. A
few of the old yashiki remain as barracks, and their white walls,
resting on black foundations, suggest the monotonous street views
of feudal days. Other yashiki have fallen to baser uses, and sign-
boards swing from their walls.
Modern sanitary science has plucked up the miles of lotus beds
that hid the triple moats in midsummer. From the bridges the lounger
used to overlook acres of pink and white blossoms rising above the
solid floors of bluish-green leaves; but the Philistines could not
uproot the moats, which remain the one perfect feudal relic of
Japanese Yeddo. The many-angled gate-ways, the massive stone
walls, and escarpments, all moss and lichen-grown, and sloping from
the water with an inward curve, are noble monuments of the past.
Every wall and embankment is crowned with crooked, twisted,
creeping, century-old pines, that fling their gaunt arms wildly out, or
seem to grope along the stones. Here and there on the innermost
rings of the moat still rise picturesque, many-gabled towers, with
white walls and black roofs, survivors from that earlier day when they
guarded the shiro, or citadel, and home of the Shogun.
The army is always in evidence in Tokio, and the little soldiers in
winter dress of dark-blue cloth, or summer suits of white duck,
swarm in the neighborhood of the moats. In their splendid uniforms,
the dazzling officers, rising well in the saddle, trot by on showy
horses. On pleasant mornings, shining companies of cavalry file
down the line of the inner moat and through the deep bays of the
now dismantled Cherry-Tree gate to the Hibiya parade-ground,
where they charge and manœuvre. When it rains, the files of
mounted men look like so many cowled monks, with the peaked
hoods of their great coats drawn over their heads, and they charge,
gallop, and countermarch through mud and drizzle, as if in a real
campaign. Taking the best of the German, French, Italian, and British
military systems, with instructors of all these nationalities, the
Japanese army stands well among modern fighting forces. There is
a military genius in the people, and the spirit of the old samurai has
leavened the nation, making the natty soldiers of to-day worthy the
traditions of the past.
A large foreign colony is resident in Tokio, the diplomatic corps,
the great numbers of missionaries, and those employed by the
Government in the university, schools, and departments constituting
a large community. The missionary settlement now holds the Tsukiji
district near the railway station; that piece of made ground along the
shore first ceded for the exclusive occupation of foreigners. Besides
being malarial, Tsukiji was formerly the rag-pickers’ district, and its
selection was not complimentary to the great powers, all of whose
legations have now left it. To reside outside of Tsukiji was permitted
to non-officials in extra-territorial times only when in Japanese
employ. Any who chose to live in Tokio were claimed as teachers by
some kindly Japanese friend, who became responsible for the
stranger’s conduct. Before the revision of the treaties with foreign
powers, which compacts became operative July 17, 1899, a
foreigner could not go twenty-five miles beyond a treaty-port without
a passport from the Japanese foreign office issued after a personal
application to his legation in Tokio. Each place which he wished to
visit had to be named, and immediately upon his arrival at a tea-
house, the district policeman called for the passport and registered
the stranger. Any one attempting to travel without a passport was
promptly escorted to the nearest treaty-port. European tourists had a
formidable list of rules of conduct which their ministers exhorted
them to observe—that they should not quarrel, deface monuments,
destroy trees or shrubs, break windows, or go to fires on horseback.
The American tourist was trusted to behave without such minute
instructions, and at Kobé could visit the Kencho and ask a permit to
visit Kioto without the intervention of his consul—a recognition of the
freedom and independence of the American citizen, and a tribute to
the individual sovereignty of his nation, concerning which a
Japanese poet wrote:

“What are those strangely-clad beings

Who move quickly from one spot of interest to another
Like butterflies flitting from flower to flower?
These are Americans,
They are as restless as the ocean,
In one day they will learn more of a city
Than an inhabitant will in a year.
Are they not extraordinary persons?”

All the legations are now on the high ground in the western part of
the city near the castle moats. All legation buildings are owned and
kept up by their respective governments. The Japanese
Government, having offered to give the land if the United States
would erect a permanent legation, finally built and rented the present
structure to the great republic before it was purchased.
The English possess a whole colony of buildings in the midst of a
large walled park, affording offices and residences for all the staff.
Germany, Russia, France, and the Netherlands own handsome
houses with grounds. The Chinese legation occupied part of an old
yashiki until a beautiful modern structure replaced the “spread-out-
house” of such picturesqueness, and iron grilles succeeded the
quaint, old pea-green and vermilion gate-way.
The show places of Tokio are the many government museums at
Uyéno Park, the many mortuary temples of the Tokugawa Shoguns
at Shiba and Uyéno, the popular temple of Asakusa, and the Shinto
temple at the Kudan, with its race-course and view of the city; but the
Kanda, the Kameido, the Hachiman temples, many by-streets and
queer corners, the out-door fairs, the peddlers, and shops give the
explorer a better understanding of the life of the people than do the
great monuments. Here and there he comes upon queer old
nameless temples with ancient trees, stones, lanterns, tanks, and
urns that recall a forgotten day of religious influence, when they
possessed priests, revenues, and costly altars.
 An army of jinrikisha coolies waits for passengers at the station,
and among them is that Japanese Mercury, the winged-heeled
Sanjiro, he of the shaven crown and gun-hammer topknot of samurai
days. His biography includes a tour of Europe as the servant of a
Japanese official. On returning to Tokio he took up the shafts of his
kuruma again, and is the fountain-head of local news and gossip. He
knows what stranger arrived yesterday, who gave dinner parties, in
which tea-house the “man-of-war gentlemen” had a geisha dinner,
where your friends paid visits, even what they bought, and for whom
court or legation carriages were sent. He tells you whose house you
are passing, what great man is in view, where the next matsuri will
be, when the cherry blossoms will unfold, and what plays are coming
out at the Shintomiza. Sanjiro is cyclopædic at the theatre, and as a
temple guide he exhales ecclesiastical lore. To take a passenger on
a round of official calls, to and from state balls or a palace garden
party, he finds bliss unalloyed, and his explanations pluck out the
heart of the mystery of Tokio. “Mikado’s mamma,” prattles Sanjiro in
his baby-English, as he trots past the green hedge and quiet gate of
the Empress Dowager’s palace, and “Tenno San,” he murmurs, in
awed tones, as the lancers and outriders of the Emperor appear.
First, he carries the tourist to Shiba, the old monastery grounds
that are now a public park. Under the shadow of century-old pines
and cryptomeria stand the mortuary temples of the later Shoguns,
superb edifices ablaze with red and gold lacquer, and set with panels
of carved wood, splendid in color and gilding, the gold trefoil of the
Tokugawas shining on every ridge-pole and gable. These temples
and tombs are lesser copies of the magnificent shrines at Nikko, and
but for those originals would be unique. On a rainy day, the green
shadow and gloom, the cawing of the ravens that live in the old pine-
trees, and their slow flight, are solemn as death itself; and the
solitude of the dripping avenues and court-yards, broken only by the
droning priests at prayer, and the musical vibrations of some bell or
sweet-voiced gong, invite a gentle melancholy. On such a day, the
priests, interrupted in their statuesque repose, or their pensive
occupation of sipping tea and whiffing tiny pipes in silent groups
around a brazier, display to visitors the altars and ceilings and
jewelled walls with painstaking minuteness, glad of one ripple of
excitement and one legitimate fee. Led by a lean, one-toothed priest,
you follow, stocking-footed, over lacquer floors to behold gold and
bronze, lacquer and inlaying, carving and color, golden images
sitting in golden shadows, enshrined among golden lotus flowers,
and sacred emblems. In one temple the clear, soft tones of the
bronze gong, a bowl eighteen inches in diameter and a little less in
depth, vibrate on the air for three full minutes before they die away.
Up mossy stair-ways, between massive embankments, and
through a shady grove, the priest’s clogs scrape noisily to the
hexagonal temple, where the ashes of Hidetada, the Ni Dai Shogun,
Iyeyasu’s son, lie in a great gold lacquer cylinder, the finest existing
specimen of the lacquer of that great art age. The quiet of Shiba, the
solemn background of giant trees, the deep shadows and green
twilight of the groves, the hundreds of stone lanterns, the ponds of
sacred lotus, the succession of dragon-guarded gate-ways, and
carved and gorgeously-colored walls, crowd the memory with lovely
pictures. Near a hill-top pagoda commanding views of the Bay and of
Fuji, stands the tateba of a cheerful family, who bring the visitor a
telescope and cups of cherry-blossom tea.
A colony of florists show gardens full of wonderful plants and
dwarf-trees, and then Sanjiro minces, “I think more better we go see
more temples;” and we go, spinning past the giant Shiba gate and up
the road to Atago Yama, a tiny temple on the edge of a precipitous
hill-top, approached by men’s stairs, an air-line flight of broad steps,
and women’s stairs, curving by broken flights of easier slope. A
leper, with scaly, white skin and hideous ulcers, extends his
miserable hand for alms, and picturesque, white-clad pilgrims, with
staff and bell, go up and down those breathless flights. The tateba,
with their rows of lanterns, where the nesans offer tea of salted
cherry blossoms, that unfold again into perfect flowers in the bottom
of the cup, overhang the precipice wall, and look down upon the
Shiba quarter as upon a relief map.
A breathless rush of two miles or more straight across the city,
past flying shops, beside the tooting tram-way and over bridges, and
Sanjiro runs into Uyéno Park, with its wide avenues, enormous trees,
and half-hidden temple roofs. The ground slopes away steeply at the
left, and at the foot of the hill lies a lotus lake of many acres that is a
pool of blossoms in midsummer. A temple and a tiny tea-house are
on an island in the centre, and around the lake the race-course is
overarched with cherry-trees. Great torii mark the paths and stairs
leading from the shore to the temples above.
At Uyéno are more tombs and more sanctuaries, avenues of
lanterns, bells, and drinking-fountains, and a black, bullet-marked
gate-way, where the Yeddo troops made their last stand before the
Restoration. Near this gate-way is the sturdy young tree planted by
General Grant. Far back in the park stand the mortuary temples,
splendid monuments of Tokugawa riches and power, though the
most splendid, here as at Shiba, have been destroyed by fire.
When the Tokio Fine Arts Club holds one of its loan exhibitions in
its Uyéno Park house, Sanjiro is inexorable, deposits his fare at the
door-way, shows the way to the ticket-office, and insists upon his
seeing the best work of the great artists. The noble club-men
contribute specimens from their collections of lacquer, porcelain,
ivories, bronzes, and kakemonos. Behind glass doors hang
kakemonos by the great artists, and Japanese visitors gaze with
reverence on the masterpieces of the Kano and Tosa schools. The
great art treasures of the empire are sequestrated in private houses
and godowns, and to acquire familiarity with them, to undertake an
art education in semiannual instalments by grace of the Fine Arts
Club, is a discouraging endeavor. It would be more hopeful to seek
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the British Museum, or Mr.
Walters’s Baltimore galleries, which contain an epitome of all
Japanese art. At the Tokio Club, however, works of Sosen and
Hokusai, the two masters of the last century, are often exhibited.
Sosen painted inimitable monkeys, and connoisseurs of to-day
award him the tardy fame which his contemporaries failed to give. As
a rule, foreigners prefer Hokusai to all other masters, and they
search old book-shops in the hope of stumbling upon one of the
innumerable books illustrated and sometimes engraved by this
prolific genius. His genius never lacked recognition, and a century
ago all feudal Yeddo went wild over his New-year’s cards, each one
a characteristic and unique bit of landscape, caricature, or fantasy.
His fourteen volumes of Mangwa, or rough sketches, and his One
Hundred Views of Fuji are most celebrated; but wonderfully clever
are his jokes, his giants, dwarfs, demons, goblins, and ghosts; and
when he died, at the age of ninety, he sighed that he could not live
long enough to paint something which he should himself esteem.
After the visit to the club Sanjiro takes his patron to the tomb of
Hokusai, in a near-by temple yard, and shows the brushes hung up
by despairing and prayerful artists, who would follow his immortal
methods.
East of Uyéno stands the great Asakusa temple, shrine of one of
the most famous of the thirty-three famous Kwannons of the empire,
the great place of worship for the masses, and the centre of a Vanity
Fair unequalled elsewhere. Every street leading to the temple
grounds is a bazaar and merry fair, and theatres, side shows,
booths, and tents, and all the devices to entrap the idle and the
pleasure-seeking, beset the pilgrim on his way to the sanctuary. In
florists’ gardens are shown marvels of floriculture, in their ponds
swim goldfish with wonderfully fluted tails, and in tall bamboo cages
perch Tosa chickens with tail feathers ten and twelve feet long.
Menageries draw the wondering rustics, and they pay their coppers
for the privilege of toiling up a wood, canvas, and pasteboard
Fujiyama to view the vast plain of the city lying all around it, and on
timbered slopes enjoy tobogganing in midsummer. Penetrating to the
real gate-way, it is found guarded by giant Nio, whose gratings are
spotted with the paper prayers that the worshipful have chewed into
balls and reverently thrown there. If the paper wad sticks to the
grating, it is a favorable omen, and the believer may then turn the
venerable old prayer-wheel, and farther on put his shoulder to the
bar, and by one full turn of the revolving library of Buddhist scriptures
endow himself with all its intellectual treasure.
The soaring roof of the great temple is fitly shadowed by camphor-
trees and cryptomeria that look their centuries of age, and up the
broad flagging there passes the ceaseless train of believers. One
buys corn and feeds the hundreds of pigeons, messengers of the
gods, who live secure and petted by all the crowds in the great
enclosure, or pays his penny to secure the release of a captive
swallow, that flies back every night to its owner. At the foot of the
steps the pilgrim begins to pray, and, ascending, mumbles his way to
the altar. The colossal money-box, which is said to gather in over a
thousand dollars on great holidays, rings and echoes well to the fall
of the smallest coin. The sides of the temple are open to the air, and
the visitor may retain shoes and clogs, so that the clatter of these
wooden soles, the pilgrims’ clapping and mumbling, mingle in one
distracting roar.
Tame pigeons fly in and out through the open walls, and children
chase each other across the floor; but behind the grating candles
burn, bells tinkle, priests chant, and rows of absorbed worshippers
clap, toss their coppers, and pray, oblivious of all their surroundings.
 CHAPTER VII
TOKIO—CONTINUED

There are no such holiday-makers as the Japanese. The whole

twelvemonth is fête-time, and the old year held three hundred and
sixty-five festivals and anniversaries. All the great days of the
Chinese calendar are observed, and the death-day of past
sovereigns, instead of the birthday; while each religion, each sect,
each temple, and each neighborhood has its own fête or matsuri,
religious in its origin. Every night different temple grounds and
different streets glow with lanterns and torches, an out-door fair is in
full progress, and happy, laughing, chattering men, women, and
children enjoy it all. The evening flower-fairs are as characteristic
and picturesque as anything in Japan. The smoke of blazing
flambeaux, the smell of the women’s camellia seed hair-oil, and the
mingled odors from booths and portable restaurants, are not enticing
on a hot night, but at least they offend in an “artless Japanese way.”
The booths along the whole length of the Ginza offer innumerable
odd notions, queer toys, pretty hair-pins, curios, and indescribable
trifles, every night in the year. The Japanese hair-pin, by-the-bye, is
a dangerous vanity, the babies often twisting themselves into the
range of its point, and the mothers impaling them on it in shaking
them up higher on their backs and tightening the bands that hold
them. The comic and ingenious toys, embodying the simplest
principles of mechanics, and by the aid of a little running water, or
the heat of a candle, performing wonderful feats, are such trifles of
bamboo, thin pine, paper, or straw, as American children would
destroy at a touch. Yet the more truly civilized Japanese little people
play with them for weeks; and they toddle home with minute wicker
cages of semi, or cicada, on one finger, content to hang them up and
listen peaceably to the strident captives’ chirping mi-mi-mi all day
long.
 THE SEMI’S CAGE

The first week of March is gala time for the small girls of Japan,
when their Hina Matsuri, or Feast of Dolls, is celebrated. Then do toy
shops and doll shops double in number and take on dazzling
features, while children in gay holiday clothes animate the streets.
Little girls with hair elaborately dressed, tied with gold cords and
bright crape, and gowns and girdles of the brightest colors, look like
walking dolls themselves. The tiniest toddler is a quaint and comical
figure in the same long gown and long sleeves as its mother, the
gay-patterned kimono, the bright inner garments showing their edges
here and there, and obis shot with gold threads, making them
irresistible. Nothing could be gentler or sweeter than these Japanese
children, and no place a more charming play-ground for them. In the
houses of the rich the Dolls’ Festival is second only to the New Year
in its importance. The family don their richest clothing, and keep
open house for the week. The choicest pictures and art treasures are
displayed, and with these the hina or images that have been
preserved from grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ time,
handed down and added to with the arrival of each baby daughter.
These dolls, representing the Emperor, Empress, nobles, and ladies
of the old Kioto court, are sometimes numbered by dozens, and are
dressed in correct and expensive clothing. During the holiday the
dolls are ranged in a row on a shelf like an altar or dais, and food
and gifts are placed before them. The tiny lacquer tables, with their
rice-bowls, teapots, cups, plates, and trays, are miniature and
exquisite likenesses of the family furnishings. Each doll has at least
its own table and dishes, and often a full set of tableware, with which
to entertain other dolls, and amazing prices have been paid for sets
of gold and carved red lacquer dishes, or these Lilliputian sets in
wonderful metal-work. After the festival is over, the host of dolls and
their belongings are put away until the next March; and when the
beautiful images emerge from the storehouses after their long hiding
they are as enchanting as if new. Nothing better illustrates inherent
Japanese ideas of life and enjoyment, and gentleness of manners,
than this bringing out of all the dolls for one long fête week in the
year, and the handing them down from generation to generation.
On the fifth day of the fifth month comes the boys’ holiday. The
outward sign is a tall pole surmounted with a ball of open basket-
work, from which hang the most natural-looking fish made of cloth or
paper. Such a pole is set before every house in which a boy has
been born during the year, or where there are young boys, and some
patriarchal households display a group of poles and a school of carp
flying in the air. These nobori, as the paper carp are called, are of
course symbolic, the carp being one of the strongest fish, stemming
currents, mounting water-falls, and attaining a great age. Many of
these nobori are four or five feet in length, and a hoop holding the
mouth open lets them fill and float with as life-like a motion as if they
were flapping their fins in their own element. In-doors, images and
toys are set out in state array—miniature warriors and wrestlers,
spears, banners, and pennants, and all the decorative paraphernalia
that once enriched a warrior’s train. In all classes children’s parties