Italian migration, a movement that has involved the displacement of over 26 million women, men, and children, remains a dynamic field of study. A simple Google search under the heading ‘Italian migration’ generates over 36 million results – 21 per cent of the search results under ‘migration’. What is it about Italian migration that continues to fascinate researchers and the general public alike? Matteo Sanfilippo’s new book, Nuovi problemi di storia delle migrazioni italiane, explores this question by mapping the state of the field in the twenty-first century. Written as a sequel to his first volume, Problemi di storiografia dell’emigrazione italiana (Viterbo, Sette città, 2002), this book now focuses on what Sanfilippo terms ‘an epochal turning point’ characterised by a soaring number of volumes, articles, exhibitions, films, and other works (including university modules) that have contributed to the field up to 2015. Parallel to this recent surge of works has been the increasing attention given to migration by governments, the media, cultural institutions, and the wider public. To use Sanfilippo’s words, Italy is a historically significant place of arrivals and departures, a place in which this binary movement has always generated vertiginous mobility within the peninsula (p. 20).

Sanfilippo’s new book is divided into four sections. Chapter 1 examines the historiography and the major themes underscored in the last five years. From 2010 to 2015, the number of publications and other works on Italian migration reached new heights of scholarly interest amid increasingly complex forums involving political debates and the mass media. One of the questions that Sanfilippo tackles is the place that the history of Italian migration holds within the broader Italian historiography while calling for new questions to be raised in the field. A number of these have recently emerged on topics like political-cultural crossings in the Americas, migration, media and the imaginary, food and consumption, sport and identity, undocumented migration, religion, and, in response to Donna Gabaccia’s call for ‘immersion into the private spheres of the diaspora’ (2005), on the intersections between intimacy, emotions and migration.

Chapters 2 to 4 focus on the personal and public writings of migrants, namely, letters, diaries, autobiographies, and the press. Here, Sanfilippo looks attentively at the renewed enthusiasm with which migration historians, and particularly Italian historians writing in the twenty-first century, have examined these sources. Especially since the post-war years, letters, autobiographies, and the press have been fundamental sources through which historians gained access to the subjective experiences of migrants and their families ‘in their own words’. Sanfilippo outlines the emergence of scholarly interest in these sources and the ways in which new questions, approaches and analyses have shaped the construction of migration and the identity and experience of migrants. Drawing from the works of Emilio Franzina, Antonio Gibelli and others, Sanfilippo explores some of the striking differences in the analytical work of Italian and international historians concerning, for instance, the letters of migrants. Given these complexities and debates, he compels us to reflect how indeed we should be using letters in our analyses (p. 71).

The next two chapters (5 and 6) examine two critical themes in current Italian migration studies: Italian women migrants and the symbolic significance of the city of Turin. Galvanised by the recent works of Corti (2013) and Franzina (2013), not to mention the transnational work of Gabaccia and Iacovetta (2002), Reeder (2003) and others, historians have increasingly examined the role of Italian women as protagonists in migration movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sanfilippo’s inquiry here includes how the trifold experiences of migration (immigration, emigration, and internal migration) of Italian women differed from those of other Italian and European women during these centuries. In the second part of this section, Sanfilippo analyses Turin as a focal point of Italian migration. Conversations with historian Franco Ramella have led to the view that Turin is a city imbued with a history of migration spanning many hundreds of years. It is no coincidence, Sanfilippo argues, that ‘a comparison quickly emerged between the former migrations originating in southern Italy and new migrations originating outside the EU’ (p. 153).

The last two chapters, 7 and 8, focus respectively on twentieth-century Italian migration trends in cinema and on undocumented Italian migration, best summarised in Gian Antonio Stella’s famous slogan, ‘Quando i clandestini erano italiani’. From Visconti’s neorealist Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960) to Crialese’s Terraferma (2011) numerous films have given migration a starring role. However, as Sanfilippo remarks, whether these films were tailored to general or specialised audiences, many of them missed the opportunity to use the context in order to convey interpretive nuances. Moreover, with the exception of a handful of films, including Cesare deve morire (2012) by the Taviani brothers, and films by Italian-American, Italian-Canadian, and other hyphenated or non-Italian directors, reflections on the interactions between the three forms of Italian migration have hardly drawn the attention of directors. This observation has led Sanfilippo to surmise that ‘the narration of migration on the silver screen seems to be a question of personal experiences’ (p. 170). Finally, when we consider undocumented migrants, the number of Italians who migrated without papers to other European countries since at least the invention of the modern passport until the post-war period has been considerable. Sanfilippo observes that precisely because this kind of migration had a significant impact on the economic, social, and political development of Europe, it remained largely unnoticed (p. 184), and continues to this day.

Matteo Sanfilippo’s new book is an essential, stimulating source for students, scholars and wider audiences interested in Italian migration studies and Italian history. Among the many excellent points that he raises in this historiographical overview of recent themes and approaches in twenty-first century scholarship on Italian migration, Sanfilippo discusses the challenges met by young Italian scholars in seeking employment outside their home country. Many – like their migrant compatriots – face the reality of pursuing careers away from home. Sanfilippo remarks, ‘They are the ones to reflect on the present situation and examine if anything similar had occurred in the past’ (p. 127). In his call for a threefold approach, Sanfilippo notes that as the historiography of past migrations was being written in the first decades of the twenty-first century, countless women and men were migrating to, from, and within the peninsula. Throughout this extraordinary conjuncture, he concludes, ‘researchers have worked with the constant reminder that they were writing about events and experiences similar to those occurring before their eyes’ (p. 188). What better way, perhaps, to capture the heart, mind, and soul of migration.