Transnational Italians. "Visits Home: Migration Experiences Between Italy and Australia" by Loretta Baldassar and "In Search of Kings: What Became of the Passengers of the 'Re D'Italia'" by Tony de Bolfo. [review]

Abstract

Melbourne journalist Tony de Bolfo's original interest in the Re d'Italia was in recovering the history of his grandfather Silvio de Bolfo, who, together with two of his brothers, was among the migrants on the ship. In time Tony de Bolfo's curiosity expanded to encompass a search for the stories of all the Melbourne-bound Italian passengers. Baldassar, the daughter of Italian immigrants and an anthropologist at the University of Western Australia, writes of her fascination with the problem of how individuals, families and communities sustain and manage relationships over vast distances of space and time. The focus of her ethnographic study, "Visits Home", is a group of Italians who migrated from the village of San Fior in the province of Treviso in north-eastern Italy to Perth.