Italian mobility is arguably older than Italy itself, a global phenomenon touching every continent except Antarctica. As a long-standing constituent of rural societies inhabiting the Italian peninsula, mobility has generated diverse patterns of movement over time – from transhumance to seasonal and circular migrations, from intra-European and Mediterranean flows to overseas definitive transfers (Audenino and Tirabassi Reference Audenino and Tirabassi2008; Sanfilippo Reference Sanfilippo2005). The Italian Diaspora, as framed by eminent scholar Donna Gabaccia (Reference Gabaccia2000, 1), counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration (Bade Reference Bade2003, 110–17).Footnote 1 Although impressive, those figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories, which this special issue aims to include.
We are well aware that the environment is often a hidden guest in influential historiographical works reconstructing Italian migratory flows. Stories of Italians farmers in South America (Zannini and Gazzi Reference Zannini and Gazzi1993; Brunello Reference Brunello1994; Franzina Reference Franzina2000; Canovi Reference Canovi2009; Gallo Reference Gallo1983), the US (Martellini Reference Martellini, Bevilacqua, De Clementi and Franzina2001; Gumina Reference Gumina1978), France (Teuillières Reference Teuillières2012), North Africa (Cresti Reference Cresti1996; Cresti Reference Cresti2011) and East Africa (Ertola Reference Ertola2017) are well explored, as are stories of Italian labourers in Belgium (Cumoli Reference Cumoli2009; Morelli Reference Morelli2004), Switzerland (Barcella Reference Barcella2018), Germany (Petersen Reference Petersen1993), Australia (Baldassar Reference Baldassar2001), Canada (Ramirez Reference Ramirez1990; Iacovetta Reference Iacovetta1992) and the UK (Colucci Reference Colucci2009). Despite their successes, none of these historiographical reconstructions framed their accounts with the environment at the centre of their analysis, in terms of content, structure or methodology. In order to reconfigure this framing, this special issue encompasses cases of Italian mobility by adopting the perspective of environmental history. Following Fisher (Reference Fisher2020), we intend to analyse how Italians transformed and used distant foreign environments in order to resemble their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as a way to materially re-imagine landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.
As Marco Armiero and Richard Tucker (Reference Armiero and Tucker2017) wrote in their ground-breaking edited volume on the environmental history of migrations (hereafter EHM), ‘migrants are nature on the move’. As they travel, work, and dwell in foreign lands they bring along their ecological reasoning, as well as vast and diverse toolkits of practices, seeds, animals, cultures, and perceptions of the environment. Whilst the relationship between settlers and the environment has long been at the centre of analysis in American environmental history (Crosby Reference Crosby1973; Cronon Reference Cronon1983; Richards Reference Richards2003), much less attention has been paid to the active ecological role of migrants in shaping their immigration land, with some notable exceptions (Rome Reference Rome2008; Nash Reference Nash2006, Mitchell Reference Mitchell1996; Kraut Reference Kraut1994). Recently, a few authors have investigated the nexus between leisure spaces, urban environmental history, and migration (Fisher Reference Fisher2015; McCammack Reference McCammack2017), while others have focused on state-led internal colonisation projects (Nobbs-Thiessen Reference Nobbs-Thiessen2020). North American environmentalists and the early conservation movement have often blamed immigrants for harming the beauty of the American environment (Warren Reference Warren1999) or as carriers of threatening invasive species (Coates Reference Coates2007). In urban environments, migrants’ ecologies have long been blamed as retrograde and unfit for modern times (Mazzoli and Valisena Reference Mazzoli and Valisena2020; McNeur Reference McNeur2014).
By combining both scholarships of Italian mobility history and EHM, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness.
What emerges in all the essays is an explicit link between migration, agriculture and colonisation, where colonisation refers to the set of strategies that states (such as Italy, the USA, Argentina, Brazil and Russia) adopted to expand the agricultural frontier within their national and colonial borders. Indeed, Mark Choate (Reference Choate2008) in his essay Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad argues that this nexus seems to be a common aspect of Italian migration and underlines the unique entanglement between the history of Italian ‘free emigrants’ colonies’ (the so-called ‘colonie libere’) and imperial ‘demographic colonies’ in North and East Africa. There is a continuous aspect of expanding European agriculture at the expense of local and native systems, coupled with the impact of Italian communities settled abroad in different ways but always within a particular political framework. The expansion of agricultural frontiers at the expense of allegedly unproductive forests, wastelands and desert, with the rhetoric of civilisation and the transfiguration of foreign spaces as legible and familiar environments, were political instruments of control for either Italy, or for ruling governments in the countries of arrival. In certain cases, those two aspects coincided, as Gilberto Mazzoli (Reference Mazzoli2021, this issue) synthesises as the expression of ‘agricultural diplomacy’. This was especially the case during the Fascist era, when all those elements intertwined to the point that Italian migration and colonisation were no longer considered two independent processes (Labanca Reference Labanca2007; Choate Reference Choate2008, 2, 14; Pergher Reference Pergher2019). The awareness of this colonial implication of Italian migration draws us to pay attention to pre-colonial landscapes and to forms of injustice and violence embedded in socio-environmental transformations. This conundrum deeply influenced the formation of the very idea of Italian mobilities outside the madrepatria, as well as informing Italian state policies on emigration, colonisation and even continuing to present-day immigration (Ben Ghiat and Hom Reference Ghiat and and S2016; Hom Reference Hom2019).
The analysed schemes channelling Italian rural workers abroad generated and relied on an idealised image of the Italian migrant, alongside a romanticised picture of the Italian landscape. Who was the ideal Italian migrant then? Mostly a loyal farmer who was attached to his own plot of land, morally and with his particular skills crafted to be a perfect owner, able to cooperate and create an exclusive white settler society in a new environment, the famous ‘Little Italies’ (Gabaccia Reference Gabaccia2006). Those narratives collide with the fact that Italians never came first, anywhere. They were not early-comers in the scramble for Africa; neither were they the first choice for Latin American and North American governments. Other nations took over the ‘best’ overseas territories and other European nationalities would have been preferred over Italians to improve vast expanses on the other side of the Atlantic. Due to these forced combinations, the forge of environmental imaginaries, long-term Italian migratory culture and its interrelationship with natural factors played a major role compared to other national communities migratory flows. The role of memories and biomes, the connection between place-based stories and transnational narratives, oral history and discourse analysis methodologies appears key to unveiling this tension.
Another common element is that in several migratory instances, original rural and regional lifestyles and practices not only persisted but actually flourished in their new contexts. As anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (Reference De Martino1977) described, senses of belonging for mobile subjects are played around practices of appaesamento. The expression hardly translates into English, but can be understood as recognising oneself as of, from and part of the paese (the village but also the country). This very issue of Italian paese/Paese and the rematerialisation of individual and collective spaces of belonging cut across all the cases, blurring the dichotomies of rural space versus urban space and colonised versus colonisers (Italian coloni). The environments of Italianness were, as a matter of fact, spaces of resistance to top-down schemes and ways of adjustment to conditions on the ground.
The five essays featured in this special issue aim to offer a broad – although still partial – overview on the socio-ecologies of Italian mobility. Spanning from the 1820s to the 1940s, these essays analyse well-known migration routes, such as those connecting Italy with Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, together with less-famous settler colonies such as that of Kerch in Tzarist Russia's Crimea, and the colonial territory of Libya. We focus on Italian mobilities as we believe that the global extent of Italian wayfaring across the world offers a unique vantage point for studying the agency of migrants in transforming foreign environments. On the other hand, the grand environmental transformation plans developed by Fascism (Armiero Reference Armiero2014) and the Italian liberal state might encourage post-colonial scholars to further explore Italian colonialism and its legacy within racialised present-time narratives of Italianness.
We know that this special issue is just the beginning of our engagement with the EHM and we recognise that each paper deals with an extremely partial definition of the environment. De Majo and Peruchi Moretto pay a lot of attention to ecological aspects – the forest biome, environmental hazards, plant varieties; Valisena and Canovi rather look at the cultural dimension of the environment and use the very Italian category of landscape; Rojas Gomez considers the economic use of natural resources between solo and collective practices; in Mazzoli's paper the environment mainly consists of the space for diplomatic and political cooperation; finally, in Biasillo's article the environment becomes a tool for an authoritarian government to rule and create consensus. Besides these aspects, environmental history can potentially embrace many other elements that do not appear in this special issue. As an example, scientific and technological dimensions are not explored and the same goes for encounters between different systems of knowledge and farming practices.
Acknowledgements
This special issue is the outcome of a panel organised at the Third World Congress of Environmental History that took place in Florianopolis (Brazil) in July 2019, followed by a roundtable hosted in August 2020 by the online event Streaming STREAMS at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm. We wish to thank the organising and scientific committees of both meetings for providing us with an initial space for interaction and exchange. On both occasions we received constructive and insightful feedback from Eunice Sueli Nodari and Ilaria Vanni Accarigi.
A special mention goes to Marco Armiero, to whom several of the contributors of this issue owe a debt of gratitude for his personal and intellectual generosity. He agreed to discuss key methodological knots and aspects of EHM with us in the interview that follows our essays. A second special mention goes to Stephanie Malia Hom, who promptly accepted our invitation to join our proposal and to anchor this special issue with a beautifully written final commentary.
Thanks to our anonymous reviewers for their to-the-point suggestions, and to the copy-editors for kindly assisting us in the production phase of our essays.
Needless to say, this issue would have not been possible without the support of the journal Modern Italy and we are sincerely grateful to former editors, Penelope Morris and Mark Seymour, for their encouragement and support, and to the current ones, Francesca Billiani and Andrea Mammone, for their finalising efforts.
We hope that this special issue will continue its life as it started, as a forum for discussion between different generations of scholars.
Notes on contributors
Roberta Biasillo is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She holds a PhD in Early Modern and Modern European History from the University of Bari (Italy) and her thesis focused on the role of forests in the state- and nation-building processes in Italy. She has worked at the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm and at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. She is currently researching on the environmental history of Italian colonialism in Africa.
Claudio de Majo is a PhD candidate in Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich). He has carried out research with the University of Naples L'Orientale, the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University of Rotterdam, the University of Utrecht and the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte (Brazil). His main research interests include the relation between the commons and ecology, evolutionary history and the environmental history of Italy and Brazil. He is a founding member of the American Studies academic journal JAm It! and associate editor of Global Environment.
Daniele Valisena is a PhD in History of Science, Technology and Environment. His doctoral fellowship was part of the EU funded Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN ENHANCE (grant agreement 642935) in environmental humanities. His research deals with the interplay between environmental history and migration, touching upon heritage and memory studies, oral history and environmental humanities. He is one of the co-editors of the present special issue.
