Italians who immigrated to the United States coexist between imagination and memories – Corriere.it

Between 1880 and 1915, four million Italians landed in the United States, among about 9 million immigrants who chose to cross the ocean to the Americas. The figures do not take into account the large number of people who returned to Italy: a large proportion (50/60%) in the period 1900-1914. About 70% came from the south, although between 1876 and 1900 most immigrants were from northern Italy with 45% consisting only of Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Piedmont. The reasons that drove millions of Southerners to emigrate were many, almost always due to the lack of work in Italy. Some pages of this great migration of life appear in the documentary “La storia of shame” by Nella Condorelli (Ray Storia). Motivated by a desire to know a deep story that matters to her, a young woman, Fiorella, third generation immigrant to the American continent and an established model in the world of high fashion, returns to Sicily where her grandparents emigrated in 1910.

On his journey, he meets a company of street artists, Mnemosina, who, with the help of Pircanti – the itinerant narrator of the Sicilian tale tradition, the guardian of memory – collects stories for a presentation about this generation of immigrants. I think Condorelli wanted to put a lot of meat on the fire of memories: the diaries of a Venetian teacher, songs of immigrants, period photographs, the Triangle Factory Fire, which occurred in New York on March 25, 1911, Buffalo Bill, Sacco and Vanzetti, Little Italy, the assassination of Lorenzo Panipinto in 1914, one of the most beloved socialist leaders of the Sicilian peasant movement. Excessive expressive recordings to control, we’re suddenly transitioning from fantasy to precious repertoire, from voiceover to testimony. And the keys don’t always match.