“Living here day by day, you think it’s the center of the world. You believe nothing will ever change. Then you leave: a year, two years. When you come back, everything’s changed. The thread’s broken. What you came to find isn’t there.
What was yours is gone? You have to go away for a long time… many years… before you can come back and find your people.
The land where you were born. […] Whatever you end up doing, love it.”
(Movie: Cinema Paradiso, 1988)
INTRODUCTION
The following analysis aims to study and visualize the evolution of Italian migration, with reference to the emigration data of the last 30 years.
Although Italy has had a change of role within the international migration guidelines, passing from a country of emigration to a country of immigration, the interest in the subject has never ceased. Italian emigration abroad has deeply affected the economic, social, and demographic history of the country.
Italian public opinion, in recent years, is so affected by the problems of foreign immigration directed towards our country, which seems to have almost forgotten its emigrants abroad, and the problems and difficulties they had by emigrating many decades back.
According to the latest UN data, Italy has 3,077,777 migrants, representing 5.11% of the Italian population.
In recent years the number of Italian emigrants has increased by 48,609 people, 1.6%.
THE RESEARCH
The database used were mainly three: www.istat.it ; datosmacro.expansion.com; www.emigrati.it;
The interpolation of the data has produced a single database, capable of including 30 years of emigration from Italy (1990 – 1995 – 2000 – 2005 – 2010 – 2015 – 2017 – 2020).
The processing and visualization of the data show the qualitative variation in the number of migrations by country over the last 30 years.
We can divide the countries of the settlement of Italians abroad into 5 categories:
- The first countries in the ranking for the number of Italian residents are Germany (578.841), France (343.255), United States (340.419), and Switzerland (273.918). These four countries, with 1.691.441 presences, welcome more than half of the Italian citizens in the world: among them, Germany remains firmly in the lead.
- There is therefore a second category, composed of 7 countries, with values between 100 and 250 thousand presences, among which overseas representation is prevalent: Canada 250,000, Australia 202,617, Argentina 155,008, Great Britain 173,305, Spain 125820.
- The third category (between 10,000 and 100,000 presences) is a group of 11 countries: Romania, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, Austria, Holland, Luxembourg, Chile, Sweden, and Poland.
- There are nine countries belonging to the fourth group (between 2,500 and 10,000 Italians): Denmark, Ireland, Albania, Uruguay, Libya, Greece, Mexico, Hungary, and Sri Lanka.
- The last category is made up of those countries in which no significant migrations have occurred in the last 10 years: Dominican Republic, Egypt, Slovenia, Israel, Algeria, and San Marino.
The Contemporary Italian Diaspora is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at Master in City & Technology in 2020/21 by student: Simone Grasso and faculty: Eugenio Bettucchi & Iacopo Neri.
