Below "glue" the introduction to the first volume of the series "Questions of identity".
INTRODUCTION
Charles Silvano
The migration have always been in the spotlight and reflection of the scholars for their many facets, relating to social, economic and geographical changes. To suffer the negative consequences are mainly rural and mountainous communities, which are also profoundly marked the collective memory and identity. On the one hand, in fact, migration generates a further impoverishment of the starting areas, which are deprived of the potential workforce aged mainly between 20 and 35, on the other, however, they bring new life to community, although some economic prosperity, need for new human resources.
Although the idea that commonly occurs Emigrant is that of a single person, it has only a "cardboard suitcase and can not provide that the strength of their arms, we should not underestimate the great potential of values \u200b\u200band lifestyles which it bears, which can enrich society willing to accept, provided, however, that the immigrant has the same knowledge of their identity and memory of personal history and community of origin. This is what emerges from the interviews included in this volume, which aims to provide a "memory" migrants of the two communities, taken as a symbol of the Italian Geographical. If it is true that the entire Italian Peninsula has experienced the phenomenon of migration, we still wanted to emphasize here is that concerned the community of Treviso and Santa Ninfa Sicily, through two interviews, issued by Don Canuto Toso, a priest of the Diocese of Treviso, and by Mgr. Antonio Riboldi. The first, which takes care of migrants Treviso since the Sixties, to reflect on the meaning of the word "integration", that does not mean "assimilation" or "approval", but, having as coordinates the preservation of their identity and openness the innovations arising from different lifestyles from their own, resulting in the desire to fit into the fabric of society willing to welcome new people.
The real "integration" is therefore that of a person who, conscious of their cultural and religious identity, they strive to assimilate all the rules of civil life and politics of the host country without, however, become as "other." In this context, the concept of "identity" takes on new meaning, those residing in anthropological and ethical foundations inherent in any single area of \u200b\u200bour planet, a strong identity will not dissolve in the process of integration that the individual faces when you put in a social fabric than their own, rather it enhances, but adopt the rules of civil coexistence. In this perspective, then, the 'identity' is not something static, fixed in thought patterns anachronistic, but it is a maturation process that evolves over time and that, in light of its current cultural, linguistic and religious drawing on the news feeds that the company offers friendly, so that even the "memory" is not simple nostalgia for the times and places past, but rather a make present what is the individual that their community of origin. From the interview with Don Canuto Toso also shows how, if Treviso many around the world it was possible to preserve certain values, it is mainly due to sense of family that they have preserved, and here I am reminded of "Along the way," a book by Anna Gnesa, writer of the last century original Brione Verzasca (Canton Ticino), which, referring to the families of their valley, so wrote:
" At that time, many infants died. Parish records are full of deaths of children. Even wives died young girls bled on the sack of leaves, put them in the difficult world. Sometimes death in the cold waiting room, waiting like the fox that the sheep has spawned to take away the lamb. But strong family of ten, twelve or more children with her mother for anything undone by repeated motherhood, were not rare, and formed the strength of the villages where poverty is not the dispersed emigration "(1).
lines are reminiscent of the sociological analysis of the scholar Ulderico Bernardi, an expert in the company of Treviso, or books of writer Gian Domenico Mazzocato, which in their own land, the province of Treviso, has set the novels have anointed as the defender of the Venetians defeated, those who have known the Venetian cholera and pellagra, economic misery and illiteracy. Lines are, however, that even well suited to a community - just like the Venetian - which has never been discouraged in the face of adversity in life and family drew the strength to fight so that we could build a better future.
And it is for the family that Italian immigrants from the Alps to Sicily, they were willing to do anything. Here, for example, what in his diary Don Olivo Bolzon, with a long history of worker-priest in the countries of emigration, writes:
"[a] Sicilian told me that like many others, he sees his family a month to month ' year ago a child and then back to work. This is certainly not the Christian family and yet his whole existence is for the family will work until 1975, the year of retirement, will go on forever like this, then come back. If this is human life! He does so with no regrets why not see anything better, without conscience, because it is fatalistic resignation '(2).
By Msgr. Riboldi, then, he has done his ministry as pastor in Santa Ninfa, for about eighteen years, we have been able to know the reality of Sicilian immigrants in this country, who left their homeland for Switzerland and Germany, or to go overseas, in North America and in Venezuela. When Msgr. Riboldi recalls that in the face of certain unjustified discrimination suffered by our emigrants were all by them, accepted, because it was "just like offense" and because the immigrants preserved the memory of their country, their church and their People were elsewhere, and there, they, living spiritually is to think of a passage from the Book of Gnesa, where the writer, while referring to other situations such as natural beauty and economic poverty of his home valley, seems to put on the lips and soul of these emigrants, the following sentences:
" I do not think that I very enchanted before the windows of the jewelers of the Bahnhofstrasse. Diamond: Yes, they are beautiful. But I, for my country, I have something better. Among the tufts of hair round of sheep's fescue, the drops of dew drops are a vibrant shine, love the sun, offered under the sun. Emeralds: yes, they are beautiful. But to my country, among rocks Granite is a living water, green sea-green turquoise, full of shivers and shadows and light, and quenches '(3).
In two subsequent interviews (to Caesar and Queen Sts Cimmino) becomes instead the memory, even if in broad terms, the two communities, although part of the Italian Geographical, are placed on the political border between Italy and between Switzerland and Italy and the former Yugoslavia: it is the Moesano, which includes the Val and Val Calanca Mesolcina Italian in Graubünden, and the Italian community in Istria, where, at the end of the last world war, facing the ethnic massacre perpetrated by Tito's militia, many Italians were forced to flee. It was thus not merely a migration driven by economic reasons, but an exodus that has resulted in the fragmentation of a community rich in values \u200b\u200band today, scattered in various regions of Italy, is struggling to maintain its own identity.
"About sixty years after the tragic events of the exodus of Istria and Dalmatia, it must be considered - said bitterly Mrs. Regina Cimmino - that Italian society is not yet aware of what really happened. What is known, it is because those who had relatives, and to think about marriage between people of the Littoral and South and other regions, or to "Giuliani villages", built strictly in the suburbs in forty-seven Italian cities for work. The writer Arpino, for example, was born in Pula, because his father was a military Tito Stagno was in Pula, Raimondo Vianello also, and many others, but apparently no one has ever spoken. Only recently the singer Gino Paoli reported that his mother's family was exterminated in the ravines. " That Italian society is not aware of what happened, then, is unfortunately true, but it is also true that for some 'years of talk about it more, and not only in the family: after the collapse of communist regimes, resulting relief ideological weight that has always borne the Exodus, up to the establishment of the "Memorial Day" has ceased to regard each other as a regional rather than national.
the interesting essay that the young anthropologist Michael Nussio dedicated to Puschlav, a small narrow valley between Italy and Switzerland, between the Latin and Germanic, then emerges as the identity of a community, just as that of Puschlav, be heard and valued "being connected to a particular culture, which is considered different from those which it borders. In reality, it is imbued with elements and can not be pure. " The reality seems to me to demonstrate how even the Swiss community profoundly different from one another in terms of language and culture, are But can - if conscious of their identity and mindful of its past - to give life to statehood can guarantee peaceful coexistence among its citizens.
The volume concludes with an essay by Domenico Airomir examining certain aspects of Islamic immigration: all reality, as Western societies, where it is in place any form of "mixed", are called upon to face a ' high percentage of immigrants from countries where they live values \u200b\u200bsometimes deeply at odds with those of the Old Continent. How to support the magistrate Airomir this regard, the state institutions should always be able to balance the needs integration of immigrants and the need to protect the identity of the host country characteristics. Airomir writes: "Not seeing, so to speak, all'assetto conflicts that concern the rights of people, but to the same institutional conditions, the social and political foundations of the consortium. This is because immigrants, especially the Islamic faith, have brought and bring with them a worldview that, also in the wake of the spread of fundamentalist Islamic schools is in radical contrast to the West .... " These words may seem Airomir "strong" when talking about immigrants in danger in a country like ours, which has had a long and painful history of emigration, using weights and sizes. There is a risk, particularly to exploit our emigrants abroad beyond any objective assessment, and to criminalize even entire ethnic groups established between us because of the heinous crimes committed by individuals. In reality, the concerns expressed by Airomir arise from the need to protect its citizens before the law is equal for all, that does not happen again what happened in Germany, where a woman judge, referring to the context of identity-religious Muslim couple, rejected the request for divorce from his wife, who suffered mistreatment by the husband.
migrants, therefore, does not seek nor to renounce their religion or to their own customs and traditions such as, for example, in terms of food and clothing, but for a peaceful coexistence is necessary that those who leave their homeland to settle in another are then prepared to observe the laws and regulations. ____________
Notes
1 A. Gnese, "Along the way," Dadò publisher, Locarno 2002, p. 71.
2 Diary of Don Olivo Bolzon will soon be published in this series of books.
3 A. Gnese, op. cit., p. 91.
