Presenter: Dr. Mark Chu (Department of Italian)

‘Italy is a democratic Republic, founded on labour’: so begins the first article of the Italian Constitution, adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 22 December 1947. In an interview on his 2006 documentary, Il mio paese (‘My Country’), winner of the 2007 David di Donatello for best documentary, director Daniele Vicari describes the film as a journey through the Italy of labour, understood as the kind that entails the production of things. Both Constitution and film, some 70 years apart and chronologically on either side of Italy’s so-called Economic Miracle, seek to link Italy’s sense of place with industrial production and are perhaps indicative of a persistent feature of the national imaginary, with ‘Made in Italy’ a polysemous symbol of national identity. Vicari’s documentary explores the socio-economic contradictions within one of the EU’s largest industrial producers and the filmmaker’s journey through Italy, which runs parallel to that of a group of Sicilian emigrants en route to Germany, lends itself to a reading through the lens of placemaking and un-making, belonging and un-belonging. During the journey, the director tells or listens to the stories of various Italian migrants, but also encounters migrants to Italy, and it is in these encounters that the title of the film assumes the value of an indicator of an unconscious sense of an in-group and an out-group. This paper focuses on the longest sequence of ‘My Country’, which portrays the decline of the autochthonous textile industry in Prato, Tuscany, and its ‘replacement’ by Chinese-owned fast fashion.

A seminar co-hosted by the ISS21 Migration & Integration Research Cluster and the Department of Italian