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derness of the mid-nineteenth century – with Indians, immense
forests and slaves in chains – is central to the novel and similarly to
foreign escapist travel literature translated and imported to Italy in
this period20. Having experienced all manner of adventures, Curio
and Filippo decide to go back to Italy, but when at home, they real-
ize that the Italian political and parliamentary “wilderness” is far
worse than the American one. In the end, they leave Italy for good
with a group of other young Italians who are ready to risk their lives
to make their fortune in Texas. The novel’s innovation consists in
the fact that the imported and traditional themes of the wilderness
start to mix with the emigration theme – although the latter was
treated in a rather marginal way. The protagonists themselves were
emigrants, even if they did not belong to the rural class. But the
crucial point is that the novel does not display those gloomy and
mournful elements which would characterize the majority of later
descriptions of emigrants and emigrations in Italian literature. On
the contrary, novels like Guerrazzi’s or like Il Dio ignoto, (The
Unknown God, 1876), by Paolo Mantegazze (1831–1910), under-
lined the positive aspects of the migratory choice and the benefits
that the countries of destination could offer to immigrants. This
literary current went hand in hand with several Garibaldian-
oriented political writings of the period, which theorised and hoped
for the emergence of a sort of rural-colonialist emigration to the
Americas and to Oceania and whose aim was to protest against the
apathetic and weak rural policy of the Italian ruling class.21
However, in Guerrazzi’s and Mantegazza’s works the migratory
theme has to be seen as the setting for the plot, rather than its core.
That is why neither of the two authors could be considered part of
a counter-current as opposed to a general corpus of anti-emigration
literature. Moreover, it was slightly too early. Italian writers, as well
as Italian politicians, did not have a position on emigration yet,
20 For a comprehensive list of titles on escapist travel literature published in Italy between 1870 and
1880, see Emilio Franzina (1996: 74–75, footnotes 22, 23, 24). According to Franzina, the wide
dissemination of this literary genre represented a development of the model launched by Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe (1719). Among the numerous translations of foreign authors, Italy also had its
own great Italian author of the genre, Emilio Salgari (1862–1911).
21 For a comprehensive list of these political publications, see Emilio Franzina (1996: 76, footnotes
25, 26, 27).
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN FATHERLAND