Milli mála - 01.01.2013, Blaðsíða 157
157
since the emigration phenomenon was still limited and its vastness
still unfathomed. When, shortly afterwards, it became clear that
the actual expatriation and depopulation of rural areas were issues
of national proportions, works like Guerrazzi’s or Mantegazza’s were
quickly forgotten, as Franzina claims (1996: 76), and it was the
anti-migratory literature that prevailed.
It was by the beginning of the 1880s that emigrants and emigra-
tion became key subjects in Italian literary works. Nonetheless, any
discussion of the Italian literature of emigration must begin by
considering Sull’Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889), by Edmondo De
Amicis (1846 –1908), not because this is the only Italian novel that
deals with emigration, as Folco Portinari rather arbitrarily claims
(2009: xv), but because Sull’Oceano can be considered a paradig-
matic book. The novel deals effectively with most of the arguments
which would thereafter characterise the literature of emigration.
The writer is also the narrator, a wealthy and educated bourgeois,
who takes part in a transatlantic voyage. By adopting an attrac-
tively ironic and acute first-person narrator’s voice, De Amicis ex-
plores the question of emigration from different perspectives, in-
cluding those of the emigrants themselves. Critics have had diffi-
culty categorizing the book, which could be defined as a (partially)
fictional report of an actual journey.22 Life on board becomes a
metaphor for a nation:
in the third class there were common people, in the second the bour-
geoisie, in the first the aristocracy: captain and officials represented the
government, the commissioner was the judiciary and the register for com-
plaints or praises which one could find in the dining hall functioned as
the press.23
At times De Amicis associates emigration with fatalism, silence,
pain and suffering, elements which in later fiction became common
22 De Amicis sailed to Buenos Aires in 1884 on the ship “North America”, which became “Galileo”
in the book.
23 De Amicis 2009: 22. “Nella terza classe c’era il popolo, la borghesia nella seconda, nella prima
l’aristocrazia; il comandante e gli ufficiali superiori rappresentavano il Governo; il Commissario,
la magistratura; e della stampa poteva fare ufficio il registro dei reclami e dei complimenti aperto
nella sala da pranzo.”
STEFANO ROSATTI