Towards a Unified Italy by Salvatore DiMaria

Author:Salvatore DiMaria
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319907666
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Along the lines of these findings, novelists and journalists dramatized the plight of emigrants in steerage, dressing the facts with the harrowing experiences of their anxious characters. The novelist, journalist, and poet Edmondo De Amicis gave a moving first-hand description of the emigrants’ living arrangements on board the Nord America (later renamed Galileo) on its 1884 voyage from Genoa to Buenos Aires. In his novel-reportage Sull’oceano (1889), he noted that third-class passengers, though experiencing precarious conditions, were lucky in comparison to some previous travelers who were assigned living quarters on the deck. These were left to sleep like beasts in the open, under the rain and in conditions of near starvation.15 But luck is relative. Pamela Schoenewaldt gives a powerful dramatization of the miserable conditions in the ship’s cargo hold in her When We Were Strangers. The novel’s young protagonist, Irma Vitale, recalls how steerage was a living hell: “we were the dammed, battered for our sins.” In the steamy and airless space of the ship’s deep belly, babies were born, thieves thrived, and passengers fought, went hungry, and waited hours for a seat in the rank toilet room. With the air “thick with sweat, kerosene, garlic, wet wool, fouled linen and our stale breath,” Irma remembers, crowds vied for places near the small openings around the stairwells where they could breathe some fresh air (77). The narrator of Mazzucco’s Vita (2005), speaking of the emigrants’ need to hide their money near their private parts for fear of being robbed, reminds the reader, “Everybody knows that during those interminable 12 nights [in the steamship dormitory], all sorts of things disappear—life savings, cheese, heads of garlic, virginity—never to be found again” (11). What awaited them upon arrival was not always reassuring, as many were left on their own to find work and accommodations in unfamiliar surroundings.

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