Milli mála - 01.01.2013, Page 155
155
declared that “emigrants produce crimes in a maximum proportion”16
and, with respect to the United States in particular, “countries that
produce a great quantity of immigrants, especially Ireland and Italy,
produce great proportions of criminals at the same time”17. Moreover,
“the number of criminal offences due to emigration, is enormous”18.
Probably inspired by Lombroso, Nicolò Riccardo Bonfanti, manager
of the department for labour mediation in Trento (It. Ufficio per la
Mediazione del Lavoro di Trento) and a great expert of mountain migra-
tion, reported that “emigrants generally assimilate the bad habits of
the foreign populations, not their virtue”19.
The Italian writers that, in the same period, began to make
emigration the central subject of their work used common sources
and references, which inevitably influenced their view of the phe-
nomenon. In other words, theories like those of Lombroso had an
effect on institutions and academia as well as on the literary envi-
ronment. The works of fiction were obviously different in terms of
style and structure, but what unified the Italian literature of emi-
gration was the fact that the authors considered emigration as a
fundamentally negative issue, an act against the natural laws of the
community of origin. For this reason emigration could only bring
grief and sorrow and was doomed to fail.
4.1 The Italian Novel and Emigration
The Italian bourgeois novel had its inception during the 1870s. It
was a literary genre characterised by a combination of post-Risor-
gimento political ideals and pure adventure. An example of this
genre is Il secolo che muore (The Dying Century, 1872), a novel by
Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–1873), which only partly
deals with emigration. Two young middle class Italians, Curio and
Filippo, decide to leave the squalid atmosphere of recently unified
Italy and go to America. The representation of the American wil-
16 Lombroso 1897: 45. “Gli emigranti davano una proporzione massima di delitti”.
17 Ibid, p. 45. “Gli Stati che hanno il massimo dell’immigrazione, sopra tutto Irlandese e Italiana,
danno il massimo della criminalità”.
18 Ibid, p. 45. “Si hanno grazie all’emigrazione enormi cifre di reati”.
19 Bonfanti 1914: 24. “L’emigrante si appropria in generale di vizi dei popoli fra i quali va a lavorare
senza assimilarne le virtù”.
STEFANO ROSATTI