Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

What do we care? We worked so hardto affirm our italianitàand so now let's erect a monument to Dante!1—Achille Almerini, “La colonia di Dante”The streaming series Zero broke new ground for global media by featuring a predominately Black cast depicting children of immigrants living in urban Italy. The show takes place in a fictional Milan neighborhood named Barrio on the city's outskirts, inhabited primarily by migrant and other working-class Italian-born families. The socially conscious superhero program with a romantic storyline begins with a voice-over by the main protagonist, Omar (Randi 2021). The son of Senegalese parents, Omar narrates, as he bicycles through the streets as a pizza delivery man, that he feels he is an “invisible man” whom no one notices, suggesting rather obvious links to Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man and the predicaments of African Americans in the mid-twentieth century. But his sensation of being imperceptible and obscured is not a mere personal condition but one, as Omar states, that is experienced by others where he lives: “Sono uno come tanti, invisibile come i quartieri dove abitiamo” (I am like the others, invisible like the neighborhoods where we live). He concludes, observing that it is local monuments that create a unique sense of place: “L'unica cosa che li distingue sono solo i monumenti. Al Barrio abbiamo il Monumento del Migrante. Appropriato” (The only thing that distinguishes them are the monuments. In Barrio we have the Migrant Monument. Appropriate; Randi 2021).The viewer briefly sees the monument as the camera moves as if from Omar's bicycling point of view. Subsequent shots of the statue show it more clearly, a television prop made to look like cast bronze. The sculpture, situated in a piazzetta, portrays a standing mustachioed man with a somewhat forlorn expression; he wears a fedora and carries a suitcase in his right hand. The figure, poised on a rectangular pedestal surrounded by abstracted rock-like shapes, is in turn ensconced on a circular base. This crafted icon of transience is the hub around which the show's main characters congregate as it provides them with a communal anchor that symbolically grounds them to the neighborhood.The emigrant monument portrayed in Zero is reminiscent of the various monumenti degli emigranti (emigrant monuments) found in numerous towns but rarely in urban centers throughout Italy. These public tributes to those who left to seek their fortune are sponsored and commissioned by Italians abroad and/or towns’ pro loco (grassroots organizations; Baldassar 2006, 54–59). These material commentaries on global mobilities have mostly been erected in the decades following the increase of immigrants arriving in Italy, often from outside of (western) Europe. Like the statue seen in Zero, these emigrant monuments often depict a single man with a suitcase looking into the horizon, as found, for example, in Altino (Chieti province, Abruzzo) or Calitri (Avellino province, Campania), and are identified with textual inscriptions in the singular “L'emigrante.” In other commemorative spaces, as in Vasto (Chieti province, Abruzzo), a male and female couple with a child or two are the representations of the town's citizens abroad. Inscriptions may list the local and emigrant sponsors, a poem or dedication, and/or the cities and countries where migrants have gone. These spaces are on occasion affecting reference points for summer feste del emigrante for returning emigrants or those visiting their ancestors’ hometowns (Baldassar 2006, 55–56). All in all, these monuments are sites of recognition of a community of people who have, to varying degrees, achieved a level of economic stability to organize and contribute financially and culturally to their symbolic representation of home.3 The convergence of different migrant trajectories implicitly and explicitly alluded to by the television monument visually indicates the complicated history of transnational movement of the modern in various of the monuments in In the the migrant monument is by The viewer that and other of are of a to outside to the The the the characters as Black Italians in a Italy, made an that he is the statue di a in suggesting the the statue and the migrants living in Milan turn in in the of the of African in people in numerous countries and as of public and commemorative spaces of and The in Zero of the one that in in of a in by Americans to the of in a statue of a who for the of in and to a as his the in and with the These of are of a and the of public monuments to and to of and of the is with the and history of monuments and and their to mobilities We of as the into a around and monuments. 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