Milli mála - 01.01.2013, Side 164
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Catholic parish schools in the U.S.A. numbered 4845 in 1910 and
in 1919 they increased to 5788 (Rosoli 1999: 119–144). Echoes of
this practical assistance to emigrants are found in literature, par-
ticularly in the work of one of the prominent Catholic authors of
the period, the Jesuit Francesco Saverio Rondina (1827–1897),
whose novel L’emigrante italiano (the Italian Emigrant, 1891–1892)
was published in instalments in the Civiltà cattolica, the most influ-
ential Catholic review at the time38.
4.3 The nationalist break with tradition: Enrico Corradini
(1865–1931)
The break with the traditional literature of emigration is marked
by Enrico Corradini’s novel La patria lontana (The Faraway
Fatherland, 1910). Migrants who sail in third class are still depict-
ed as wretched semi-human creatures: “men and women with their
sacks full of rags, with their children, with their hearts burdened
with thousand-year old superstitions”39; uneducated and miserable
“with all their barbarous brutality, all their humiliated humanity”40,
when “at night they went down to the holds, where they formed a
purulent, fermenting horde.”41 These descriptions are no different
from those in De Amicis’ Sull’Oceano or in several other Italian nov-
els of emigration. But Corradini’s position on emigration develops
in a different direction and his conclusion is totally distinct. The
wealthy and educated protagonist of the novel, the fervent national-
ist Piero Buondelmonti travels on an emigrant ship where, by regu-
larly mixing with the crowds and paternalistically talking to them,
he starts his campaign of imperialist persuasion that he will con-
tinue in the new country. Buondelmonti’s voyage to South America
is due to a woman, but once he gets in contact with the Italians who
38 After a long and complicated sequence of journeys (from the United States to Brazil and to the
United States again), romance, revenge, suicides, the novel ends with the usual homecoming. The
explicit moral of the story is that emigration to a strange and hostile country always implies
uncertain outcomes, against the certainty of solace that the homeland always offers.
39 Corradini 2010: 16. “Uomini e donne col sacco de’ loro cenci, con i loro figliuoli, con i loro cuori
carichi di superstizioni millenarie”.
40 Ibid.: 16. “Con tutta la loro ferocissima bestialità e tutta la loro umiliata umanità.”
41 Ibid.: 16. “La notte scendevano giù nelle stive e facevano tutt’un carnaio fermentante e suppuran-
te.”
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN FATHERLAND