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ments and failures, the two men meet in the port of Buenos Aires
when both are about to return to Italy, one with a mutilated leg, the
other a blind eye. The voyage home provides the author with the
opportunity for a moralizing and anti-emigration reflection on the
destiny of the losers who return from the New World, defeated and
discouraged. Exaltation of the simple rural life in the home country
goes hand in hand with a mournful invective against people who
unreasonably decide to emigrate to the other side of the world,
where nothing but trouble awaits them. Another anti-emigration
novel from this period – though not as popular as Marazzi’s – is
Quaranta mesi nel grande Oceano Australe (Forty Months on the Great
Southern Ocean, 1880), by Alberto Anselmi (1848–1917) . Here, a
particularly heterogeneous group of Italian emigrants embarks on a
journey to Australia. As a consequence of a mutiny, the group is
abandoned on a remote island in the South Pacific. With the help
of the discipline and of the practical instruction of Professor Pippo
Barosio, who is the actual deus ex machina in the story, like so many
new Robinson Crusoes, the migrants succeed in taming nature and
in transforming a wild environment into a habitable place. The
story ends with the group’s rescue and its “canonical” return to the
country of origin. “When they left Italy to seek their fortune they
were strangers to each other, while now, on their way back home,
poor but happy, they are like brothers”.32 Conveniently revised,
escapist travel literature, modelled on, but never emulating, Defoe’s
masterful satire, Robinson Crusoe, thus supported anti-emigration
trends in Italian literature for years to come.
As regards Marazzi and Anselmi, their novels were published in
the same year and dealt with a very similar subject. The success of
Marazzi’s Emigranti was probably due to the popularity of the au-
thor. In 1866, Marazzi took part in the battle of Bezzecca as a
Garibaldian soldier and subsequently undertook a diplomatic career
and was nominated as Consul in Buenos Aires precisely during the
years of the great Italian emigration (in Emigranti he often quotes
diplomatic documents without revealing his sources). Anselmi was
one of the authors published by the prestigious Agnelli publishing
32 Anselmi 1880: 90. “Estranei gli uni agli altri per andare in cerca di splendida fortuna, vi tornano
poveri, ma felici e a guisa di fratelli”.
STEFANO ROSATTI