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36). They were relatively few, but they settled in all the major
urban centres of Europe (Paris, London and, generally speaking,
most of the capital cities of the Old Continent) and in the United
States. Those were places where influential newspapers were pub-
lished, where heads of state met, and therefore the presence of these
people, the poorest representatives of the Italian emigrants, did not
pass unnoticed but produced a deep impression on the public and
the media during that period.6 In the early 1880s, the Italian
Ambassador in London, Emanuele D’Azeglio, was informed by the
Italian Charity Society (It. Società Italiana di Beneficenza) that Italy
was the only country to have “an organized unit of beggars, like
those little children who bring monkeys around, or those street
organ grinders who annoy everybody in the streets.”7 Other Italian
migrant workers, ordinary, hard-working framers, glaziers, carpen-
ters, even confectioners and ice-cream makers did not tarnish the
national image; but the others were much more visible and became
the dominant image of the Italian emigrant abroad.
That image contributed to the widespread scorn that the Italian
ruling classes felt towards emigrants and emigration. During the
first decades after unification, when the Italian ruling class was
constructing its own political image, the question of the external
image became linked to historical memory. Emigration became a
clear index of the failure of the development policies of the new
6 An element which contributed to the creation of the stereotype of the Italian emigrant as illiterate
was the gap between “expected image and effective reality” (Vedovelli 2011: 57), that is the gap
between the ideal image which the ruling classes in countries like the United States had of
“Italianness”, an image strongly connected with the noble and ancient intellectual culture of Italy,
and the reality of the Italian migrants arriving in huge masses who were ignorant of the existence
of that noble and ancient culture.
Nevertheless, the analysis of data indicates that from the 1920s the situation had changed
radically. According to the U.S. population census of 1920, among the 16.5 millions of Italians
born in the US, just 8 per cent were illiterate; between 1921–1922, on the basis of the evaluation
of the Bureau of Immigration, illiteracy rates among Italians decreased even further, or down to 6
per cent. In the course of less than three generations the standards of education among Italian-
American became similar to those of other Americans (Rosoli 1999: 130). Still, stereotypes of the
illiteracy and ignorance of Italian immigrants in America persist today, particularly in literature
and films.
7 Porcella 2001: 39. “Un corpo organizzato di accattoni, come sono quei piccoli ragazzi che portan
scimmie e quegli organari che annoiano il pubblico sulle strade”. These young boys and girls were
bought or taken from their families and put on the streets of the main European cities as beggars.
One of the aims of the Lanza law of 1873 (see footnote17) was to try to stop this shameful trade.
All translations from Italian, both literary and scholarly excerpts, are my own.
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN FATHERLAND