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found in a disturbing short story by Corrado Alvaro (1895–1956),
La donna di Boston (The Woman from Boston, 1929), in which even
the American widow of an Italian emigrant (who, drawn by curios-
ity, travels to her husband’s Sicilian hometown) is little by little
swallowed up by the native women of the village and, in the end,
subjected to a sort of surreal ritual of purification and transformed
into a Catholic nun.
5. Conclusion
The enormous numbers of Italian emigrants between the unifica-
tion of Italy and the beginning of the First World War have attract-
ed most of the studies on the Italian emigration. The focus on such
a specific period has caused a tendency to study the conservative
cultural issues surrounding emigrants rather than the subtler vari-
ations of those issues – the first being less complex to analyse
(Tirabassi 1990: 142). The consequence is that researchers have paid
insufficient attention to relevant individual factors such as personal
motivation. Such factors could explain, for instance, why, given the
same social and economic context (i.e. same town or village, same
job, same “status”), some people decided to emigrate and others did
not. In other words, the difficulty in studying the history of emi-
grations lies in identifying the causal factor of mobility. Yet it is
this very factor, in the end, that would enable a completely different
approach to the phenomenon. Because of the millions of migrants
involved, data analysis has not mentioned the hundreds of thou-
sands of people whose individual reasons for expatriation were dif-
ferent from those of the majority. A statistical-based approach to the
issue results in an incomplete image, a cliché of emigration. During
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Italian literary narrative
of emigration seems in the main to have followed the anti-emigra-
tion positions supported by influential political factions and the
Catholic Church. In some cases (i.e. Marazzi, Rondina, Corradini),
writers knowingly disseminated the anti-emigration propaganda of
the Church and the political elite. But even proper and legitimate
STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN FATHERLAND