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Crossing Memory

This summer, hosts Eleanor Paynter and Elena Bellina visited the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale in Italy, an archive of stories and writing ranging from diaries to handwritten notes on loose slips of paper. Eleanor and Elena spoke with the director of the archive, Natalia Cangi, and researcher Giorgia Alù for this episode about the migrant stories present in the archive. 

Thanks to Isabella Corletto for her translation and voice acting for this episode. 

Guests

Natalia Cangi

Natalia Cangi

Links

Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale

Piccolo Museo del Diaro (Little Museum of Diaries)

DiMMi Project

Opening Australia’s Multilingual Archive project

2021 DiMMi Award Presentation

2022 DiMMi Award Presentation

Transcript

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  00:00

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian, then the voiceover begins.]

Natalia Cangi (English voiceover)  00:15

I came here around September of 1991. I was in love with the writing in one diary that moved me in a very particular way. It was one I read by pure chance, because my sister, who works here at the archive and who was already working here in 1991, asked me if I could help her interpret the writing of a young Italian-Israeli man. He lived in Haifa, and he wrote an extraordinary diary in the 70s when he came to Milan. He was very young, and all of a sudden, he became a sort of leader for the student movement. It's a very lived-in diary, very hard-fought. His name is De Rabbah. The diary is very full of life, and it's also very personal, very intimate. De Rabbah left many, many diaries here in Pieve, all handwritten and original, so to speak. And he titled this collection, “Io Amo Antonietta.” “I Love Antonietta.” So it's immediately clear that the personal component of this diary is very strong. And what also comes through very strongly is the context of the years during which it was written. And so, I said, “Hey, if this is what diaries are, then I'll nominate myself to read them.”

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  01:18

[Natalia speaks in Italian.]

Eleanor Paynter  01:40

Welcome to Migrations: A World on the Move, a series brought to you by Cornell University's Migrations initiative. I'm Eleanor Paynter, ACLS fellow and Migrations fellow and your host for this podcast that seeks to understand our world through the interconnected movements that shape it. The voice you heard is Natalia Cangi, who is the director of the Fondazione Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, or the Italian National Diary Archive Foundation, which is located in the Tuscan town of Pieve Santo Stefano. In this episode, in our season on Crossing, we’re thinking about crossing not only in terms of physical borders, but the crossing of memories, both individual and collective. And we're reflecting on the place of memory, life writing, and this particular diary archive. I'm back with my cohost, Dr. Elena Bellina, who visited the archive with me this summer.

Elena Bellina  02:33

Hi, I'm Elena Bellina, adjunct faculty in the Italian department at New York University. And yes, Eleanor, this past summer, we met in July in Pieve di Santo Stefano to visit the archive, sit down, and talk with Natalia. And we visited this beautiful place, which is not just an archive, because it collects memories of all sorts—written memories by people who decided to donate their memoirs or their diaries or collections of letters at the end of their lives, or that their descendants found at a certain point, and so they decided to donate these precious memories to the archive that collects them and preserves them.

Eleanor Paynter  03:14

Yeah, and I think, you know, so this archive contains—and, of course, also the museum, as you're saying, and the surrounding events—the archive as a whole contains all kinds of memories by people documenting their own experiences in their family and their community experiences over more than 200 years of history. And of course, for our purposes here, we're especially interested in the fact that it's also effectively a kind of migration archive, because a significant amount of the materials that the archive contains are people telling their own experiences of migration, be it to Italy, from Italy, or even within Italy, so internal migration, and so it becomes this really significant place for coming to understand both migration experiences as a whole and also Italian culture and history through these narratives of mobility.

Elena Bellina  04:14

The initial diary archive was actually created by journalist Saverio Tutino, who decided in the 1980s, after a long career as foreign correspondent from different parts of the world, especially from Cuba, he decided to create a place where Italians, or people in Italy, could deposit their memoirs and life writings and journals to tell a different version of Italian history. And so, moving through different parts of Italy, and especially Tuscany, he finally spoke with the mayor of a little town, Pieve di Santo Stefano, who welcomed his idea and offered him a little space which is today the Museo del Piccolo Diario, the Museum of the Little Diary. And so, starting from 1984, Saverio Tutino started to go around, ask people to look into their basements, into their drawers, into their family warehouses, and find their grandparents’ or own memories of World War I and World War II, and send them into the diary. The first purpose of the archive was, in fact, to collect these World War II stories about the liberation of Italy and Nazi-fascism, to tell a different version of recent Italian history. And he was very successful, to the point that even Natalia Cangi told us that Saverio Tutino thought they would receive only a few diaries. But those diaries started to be hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands. And now they hold a huge collection.

Eleanor Paynter  05:52

So this is a place that's really interesting for people who are focused on the Italian context. But of course, it has really important connections with longer histories and traditions of life writing related to migration experiences. And I think listeners might be familiar with the work of people like Kurdish-Iranian journalist, and now author and filmmaker, Behrouz Boochani, who documented his experience in the Manus island prison, and is now living in New Zealand. So he documents—he actually wrote this memoir via text message, and it's now been published and has won a national literary award in Australia—from the time that he was imprisoned while waiting an asylum decision on his case.

And we can think of a lot of other, you know, narratives like this, where somebody is using, you know, any of a variety of media or forms to document their own experience, either looking back on their life, or even documenting it while it's happening in different ways. And so then in the archive, that becomes a place where people who have written about these kinds of experiences in relation to Italy can have their story preserved for other people to access and reflect on and think about and use in different ways in research and in art, and that's part of what we're here to talk about today. So these different uses of these migration narratives that a place like the National Archive, the National Diary Archive, is holding and preserving.

Elena Bellina  07:32

And Eleanor, yes, as a matter of fact, the archive has life writing that dates back to the 1700s up to nowadays. And as you said, these take very different shapes and formats. I’m thinking of a diary written on little cigarette slips by Italian prisoners of war in Northern Africa, where they literally kept these little pieces of paper in their pocket. But it's very important. It's a national piece of memory that the archive preserves so well.

Eleanor Paynter  08:01

Yeah. And so, I think part of what we're going to be hearing as we listen to Natalia Cangi talk about her work with the archive and share a couple of narratives that illustrate some of what is kept there, and we'll hear from also a researcher who's used the archive recently, I think in hearing their accounts, part of what we're thinking about is, first of all, what kind of record does this create? So, what does it mean to have a record—in this case, especially of migration—that comes from people's personal narratives and their own documented experiences? And what kind of perhaps alternative version of history does that offer us?

Elena Bellina  08:45

And exactly, to address this question of different voices from different people passing through Italy, moving in or out of Italy, the archive, starting in 2014 decided to create a very specific collection and entries of writings by migrants, the so-called “DiMMi,” an acronym that stands for Diari Multimediali Migranti, Multi-medial Diaries by Migrants to, through, from the Italian peninsula, that has become a very important moment in Italian collective history right now, because every year, different people from different parts of the world for different reasons in Italy, send their personal stories to be shared, and to be kept and preserved by the diary about their experiences moving through the Mediterranean, Africa, Central Europe, even the U.S. or South America.

Eleanor Paynter  09:46

So in this episode, we want to give a sense of how people are thinking about and working with this archive. So you're going to hear from Natalia Cangi herself—she's going to recount a couple of stories that have been especially meaningful to her in her work with the archive—and we'll also hear from Georgia Alù, who is a researcher who was visiting the archive when we were there this summer, in summer 2022.

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  10:31

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian, then the voiceover begins.]

Natalia Cangi (English voiceover)  10:52

There’s a memoir we acquired rather recently by a Sicilian man named Antonino di Rosa. He was born in Modica. No, actually, he wasn't born in Modica, he was born in Buenos Aires. But after his birth, his parents returned to Modica, and then, because of World War I, his father was called to duty and went to war. War always creates a before and an after, especially World War I, when it comes to immigration. In terms of Italian immigration, then, this family returned to Buenos Aires with this young boy was a little bit more grown up and had a strong desire to go to the United States. He was 15 years old. And it's really extraordinary to see about how many of these young men were around this age, only 15 or 16, when they managed to get travel authorization from the consulates.

Antonino di Rosa brought his parents, because obviously, he couldn't go anywhere alone, to the Italian consulate. And after he managed to overcome his mother's resistance, because of course, she didn't want him to leave, the consulate made him promise to lead a righteous life, to never compromise. And so they trusted in the judgment of a 15 year old, probably more to reassure his mother than anything else, and he was given the documents he needed to go to the United States. This level of detachment is very moving, because obviously the mother knows that Antonino is a young boy, and when she goes with him, and he's getting ready to embark, she leaves in the care of a non-Italian woman who was traveling with her two kids. She asked her to watch over him and take care of her son, which brings a lot of references to our minds. Because how many times have we read of children who were left in the care of others, especially on journeys from south to north? Casual passersby who are spotted on a train and picked maybe because they had a reassuring face, you know? And that's what happened with Antonino’s mom. Antonino arrived in the US in 1925 and started working. He was forced to take jobs that we could say were less desirable, those that are often taken every time a new population arrives in a country.

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  12:46

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian, then the voiceover begins.]

Natalia Cangi (English voiceover)  13:26

What we do know, however, is that we lose track of this man in 1943, during World War II. We don't know more about what he might have done, at least not from his writing. Because that's another thing: people who write about themselves tell you their story up to a certain point. They don't need to tell us everything, and so often they leave us with a desire to know what happened next. Something incredible that Di Rosa did was ultimately set up a small—or, really, not that small—coal company. He was able to sell coal to Roosevelt, and there's even a signed receipt by him that proves it. We're able to see that there really are so many of these kinds of immigrant experiences and stories that seem one-of-a-kind, but there are so many of them.

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  14:09

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian.]

Eleanor Paynter  14:21

I think when you hear Natalia talk about this story, you get a sense of her amazing familiarity with the stories that are in the archive. And it's interesting to me, I mean, she's making, you know, she's talking a lot about also the important connections across these historical periods. So this story is a special story, but she's also highlighting the fact that we're talking about very young people who are crossing borders, sometimes on their own, sometimes, you know, with the help of, you know, a distant relative maybe, or they have a contact somewhere where they're going.

Elena Bellina  14:58

Yeah, and she keeps underlining that what happened back then is not that different from what's happening these days, as we see on TV and on all these stories about minors crossing borders and traveling on their own; it's really history repeating itself. Because, as she underlines, I mean, whomever writes his or her life, whomever writes their lives, I mean, they never tell you the whole story. They tell you what they want you to hear. And so you always wonder what happened, what really happened back then, or when you find like, what was going on. And very often, it's history happening—World War I, World War II, big other wars or conflicts or major political events—or just personal reasons, because very often writing a journal or a memoir implies also sharing parts of your own lived experience that are not easy to be shared.

Eleanor Paynter  15:57

Yeah, and a few thoughts on what you're saying. One is that looking at life writing lets us also ask important questions about the differences over time. So it's interesting to think about his experience of obtaining documents or thinking about the resources that he had or didn't have access to when he arrived, how he might have been received in the US, his family's history of migration as part of his own story. And how that does or doesn't resonate with children and young people, youth who are crossing borders today. So, you know, how the world has changed in the meantime. So, I mean, part of what we're getting here is the resonances and frictions, when we look at individual experience and these important collective historical moments, like you're saying, this is a moment, you know, around the war around big, big national developments. And now we're thinking about migrants moving in a globalized world. And how does that prompt us to ask different questions about their experiences or their rights or what obstacles they face and how they confront them?

I'll say one other thing. It’s true, Natalia’s comment about people writing about themselves and them wanting to hear the story. You also touch on this, Elena. I mean, I think one of the things that it's important to keep in mind in engaging with this kind of archive, and this is certainly what researchers are in part interested in, is that these autobiographical materials are doing at least two things. They're both documenting an individual experience—and we can talk about also how that individual experience is very connected to collective experiences—but they're also telling us, as you said, Elena, what that person wants potential readers, imagined readers, sometimes family members who are receiving letters, sometimes potential readers of a memoir and autobiography, what they want people to remember, to know about them. So it's always a particular, you know, it's a select set of memories and a particular set of choices about how they represent themselves.

Elena Bellina  18:20

Yeah, and this is a question that, I mean, we both had to deal with, when we first approached the diary, in the past years to go in and do research, I mean, how and why people decide to write their lives and what they decide to share with us. And you have to be aware of the limits, and the great resources that this life writing represents for us as researchers, for historical, national purposes, or in general for comparative analysis of what migrants have to face or had to face through time, through histories, through different countries and continents. I mean, the millions of Italians who migrate to other continents that send tons of materials to the diary archive, I mean, are an example. But they also speak to what's happening nowadays, to this side of the world, with other groups of migrants, and of course, to what's going on in the Mediterranean with the millions of people who have been trying to cross the Mediterranean to get to Lampedusa or to Italy or to Spain.

Eleanor Paynter  19:39

I was just gonna say that one of the things I always think about when working with migration narratives of different kinds, and certainly in the in the case of life writing and different kinds of testimonial narratives, is that, certainly now, but we could think also historically, migrants are always made to tell their stories. So when they cross a border, when they apply for a visa, when they meet people in the communities where they arrive, they're constantly being prompted to testify to their experience. And so one of the interesting things about looking then at the materials in the archive is to think about to what extent, you know, when they've had time and the ability to tell their story, in their own words, for an imagined or a different audience, how do they choose to tell it? And how does that resonate or not with the versions that we might hear in more official settings? So in an asylum court, where someone is talking about why they fled, or in someone who's, you know, making their case for a particular visa application, or someone who's introducing themself to neighbors or coworkers in a place where they recently arrived. All of these things are, you know, different kinds of, involve different representations of the self and different accounts of the migration experience. And I think we always gain more by thinking across these different accounts and thinking about what might have prompted their telling and who they're being told to, and what that lets us know about the context of migration or about the person who was crossing borders.

So to think about different ways that researchers, that scholars and researchers are engaging with these materials, we felt really lucky to overlap in our visit with Dr. Georgia Alù who is Associate Professor and Chair of Italian Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney, and who reflected on some of her own use of the archives with us.

Elena Bellina  21:43

Giorgia Alù is working right now on an Australian Research Council-funded project opening Australia multilingual archives, with which the they're trying to retell modern Australian history through the lenses of the migrants who got there from different parts of the world, and she's dealing of course with Italian migration to Australia, and in particular with World War I and World War II prisoners of war who were brought there and therefore were detained in camps first, in military camps, and then stayed or returned, were repatriated to Italy and returned later to Australia as migrant workers.

Giorgia Alù  22:24

I think these first-person narratives are very precious, they are jewels that really tell us what people suffered, experienced, and things that they very often didn't have the chance to express. Their diaries are very important because they express this sense of diversity, displacement, feeling different, marginalization, discrimination, that are experienced, lived by somebody who has been eradicated from their own country. So experiences that today share also with the Italians who were already residing in, in Australia.

From my point of view, what I'm looking at, I find very fascinating the way they express themselves. So with a language that very often is very basic, grammatically incorrect, but that nevertheless shows this multilingual phenomenon in the sense that they write in Italian, sometimes their Italian is basically regional Italian, is a dialect or is broken Italian, but also they make an effort to express themselves in English, the English that they have actually learned in the camp or through relationships with the Australians or the people around them. So, this again shows their need also to interlace with the environment around themselves and the way they express their feelings, their emotions, their fears.

Elena Bellina  24:26

As we heard from Giorgia’s work, very often, these ordinary memories or life writings by ordinary people are not written in perfect Italian or perfect English or other languages. It's very often broken Italian or a use of mixed dialects and the other languages these people bring with them, including current migrants’ narratives, stories for the DiMMi. I mean, the linguistic aspect talks about how they are passing through Italy or how they are moving to, as we said at the beginning, to or from Italy to other parts of the world, because language really witnesses all these geographical movements and crossings, because it bears crossing culture, crossing memory, and crossing language is really part of migrating and telling or retelling your life as a migrant.

Eleanor Paynter  25:23

One of the reasons, again, you know, what you're talking about in terms of language is perhaps one of the reasons why often life writing and these different kinds of autobiographical media and materials wouldn't be considered literary, quote unquote. And that's an important point of discussion in studies of life writing more broadly. And I think it makes it even more important that this archive is giving a place to these narratives. So while it's equally important to be able to study the published memoirs that have gone through drafting and production and editing, and that are marketed for particular publics, and sold in bookstores, and things like that, we, you know, thanks to this archive and to other initiatives that are helping to produce and disseminate people's stories in this way—I'm thinking about the Archivio Memorie Migranti, which is also, you know, the Archive of Migrant Memories, which is a film and writing archive that collaborates sometimes with this one—you know, groups like this are working directly with migrants to help get their stories out to publics and also to preserve them again as part of the historical record. And these are stories that wouldn't necessarily get that kind of literary recognition, and yet we can recognize are nevertheless very important and an important part of this record and will be for years to come.

You know, one of the things that happens when you're in the archive is that suddenly you get a chance to see stories next to each other that might not necessarily be told together. So, you might have for example, thinking even about contemporary migration, you might have, you might pull a story written by an Albanian woman who arrived in the 1990s. And you might read that and then in the next hour, you might be reading something by a Cameroonian who arrived, you know, a Cameroonian man who arrived in 2016 or 2017. And that also, I think, is a really important aspect of the work, and it helps us again, ask better and different questions and think about how these experiences resonate or don't, across contexts and across moments in time. So, we're gonna hear from Natalia again, sharing with us one of the stories from the DiMMi project about recent migration narratives.

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  27:57

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian, then the voiceover begins.]

Natalia Cangi (English voiceover)  28:02

There's also my friend Karamoko Fofana from the Ivory Coast. This was in 2016. He was a tailor, and unfortunately, he does something different now, because he was fantastic at it, so, so great. This is an extraordinary story of hospitality around Pavia that I'll talk a little bit about. Karamoko says that he was from a family that loved and respected each other, but then they were struck by death. His parents died young, and during that time of suffering, he had the desire to make something of himself and study. His father had made his older brother study, but Karamoko was sent to become a tailor. They had a sister, too.

He has a way of telling the stories in the midst of the bloody riots in the Ivory Coast, up until the jihadists arrived and attacked the houses, which made him say, this is enough. Karamoko talks about being detained in Libya, but he also says that he will never be able to talk about the things he's seen. Karamoko’s is a story that ends well, because he arrived in Pavia, arrived in the spas in Salice Terme, to an abandoned spa building where many of these young men were housed.

There was a teacher there named Daniela, who taught her whole life and was now retired. She was Tuscan, and her husband Alberto was also Tuscan, and they had been there for an entire lifetime, because he worked for an Italian bank. Daniela was teaching these young men. Eventually, she said, I have to leave my house every day to come here. Why don't you all just come to my house? And so three of them started going to Daniela’s house, a small villa that I've been to, and the group got smaller and smaller until only got Karamoko remained. And they have a daughter, but they consider him a son, too. And they gave him a part of the house that they didn't use to work as a tailor. And so I went, and there was this whole workshop set up. I can work elsewhere, said Alberto. But anyway, I'll keep it brief.

Alberto is someone who loves the archive; he found out about it through me and he's never strayed away. He invited me to Voghera to present on the archive and on Karamoko’s story. He was obviously there, too, and the room was full. And imagine that, in Voghera there aren't really places where people are used to hearing these stories. At one point, Karamoko spoke for a long time, and he told us so many things to the point that he eventually burst out crying and left. And that's the thing, right? He was speaking for himself, I didn't ask him, anyway, he started speaking about the things he wanted to tell us about. But it really hits you then; that's when you can understand that the things that are left unsaid are so present. It can really catch you off guard.

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  30:22

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian.]

Eleanor Paynter  31:49

[In Italian: fa pensare anche a quello che dicevi prima sulla fiducia….]

I’m thinking also about what you said earlier about trust, and how much when someone writes for the first time they have to establish trust, and then maybe in telling it in a different way or with their voice instead of in writing, a different story can emerge as the relationship grows.

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  32:15

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian, then the voiceover begins.]

Natalia Cangi (English voiceover)  32:27

I'm completely convinced of this. And look, right now we're talking about the young men and women who have participated in the DiMMi project. But in reality, the thing about trust is that it's essential for whoever decides to tell their story. I could tell you about people who have followed us for over 30 years who have only now decided to bring us their own diaries a few months ago. This happened a couple of months ago—someone told us, “I've been following you since 1989.” And then they brought us their diaries that went from ‘89 to ’99 with thousands of personal thoughts and difficulties and problems. These diaries are very personal, so you may not know what is behind them, but you know that there's always something. This relationship, then, this trust is fundamental. The fact that you need to feel that an institution is a place that will welcome you and safely take care of the things you leave behind. This is fundamental.

Natalia Cangi (Italian)  33:16

[We hear Natalia speaking in Italian.]

Elena Bellina  33:28

Well, we've just heard the two main points we were making before in the sense that here, Natalia stresses the fact that first of all, when someone writes, he or she has to cope with things they would never imagine. And so in the case, in the case she mentioned with Karamoko Fofana, I mean, he really burst into tears during the presentation and left the stage because he realized at that moment the trauma he lived through that had remained silenced up to that moment. And at the same time, the fact that an archive is a great place for us as researchers, but at the same time, they have to get the trust of the people who decide to donate their materials to them. And it takes decades to do that. Because, I mean, sharing such a personal part of your life as your life writing, it's not an easy thing to do. And when you think of a case like Karamoko who lived through this, through crossing the Mediterranean, the Libyan camps, that Natalia and her team really managed to create this sense that this is a safe place where I can express myself and leave my memories with, and someone can use them because they will take care of it. So trust is a big deal for an archive where you can find this material, use this material, and leave them with them—they protect them, as she kept stressing during our conversation, right?

Eleanor Paynter  35:01

Yeah. And I think the example here is, you know, the way that she talks about his story and their relationship is a reminder that the archive is not just this sort of closed-off fixed place, but that it's also a set of relationships and an ongoing process, especially now that they're really, you know, in these moments for the prize for the DiMMi project when they're really soliciting more narratives. And, you know, we know that Natalia also and her team stay in touch with the people who share their stories, their ideas, to create webs of connection and bring people into conversation around these experiences.

And yeah, trauma is definitely part of that, not only in these very contemporary stories, but looking across the archive as well and thinking about the different struggles that people have faced as they've crossed borders and adjusted to life in new places. And that's another reason why looking at life writing as an instance of both individual experience that is absolutely personal, that itself contains gaps. That is not necessarily a complete story—she talks about what's unsaid, too. But that also resonates in different ways with the collective experience. So in Karamoko’s narrative, we hear about the Libyan camps, as you were saying, and I think, listening to his, you know, having access to his account, so to go to the archive, and be able to look at his account, and maybe a few other accounts, is also a way of filling in a more complex sense of what those experiences are like, which are often either left out of, for example, media coverage, or political debate, or they're only told in various sort of sensational ways, or as kind of generic narratives. And to have the account of somebody who has actually been there and survived that experience is, is really incredible part of the record.

Elena Bellina  37:06

And it's incredible, also the way that diary through these initiatives can reach out to many Italians and to an Italian audience that don't know much about what's going on in the lives of these people crossing the Mediterranean these days.

Eleanor Paynter  37:23

So to think about, I wanted to, you know, to add one note also about the DiMMi project, which means “Tell Me,” also, as an acronym. DiMMi, Tell Me, so it's also a sort of play on words. And I think it signals this other aspect that the archive is constantly doing, which is that they're not just collecting, they're not just a repository for people's materials, but they're actively participating in shaping the memories that will get preserved by issuing these calls. And by actively, you know, I think it's significant that Natalia and colleagues have said now for almost 10 years, the stories of people who have arrived to Italy in the last, you know, few decades are an important part of this history, and we need those documented as well in their voices. And I think it's important that those also become part, then, of the historical archive that the National Diary Archive represents.

Elena Bellina  38:26

And for DiMMi, as you said, Eleanor, it's not just Tell Me: as Natalia underlined many times during our conversation in this past July, it's also the idea that you can reshape Italian narrative through the people who are now becoming Italian or are in Italy, are part of what Italy is nowadays.

Eleanor Paynter  38:53

Thanks for listening to Migrations: A World on the Move, a podcast by Global Cornell's Migrations Global Grand Challenge, a multidisciplinary multispecies initiative that studies how the movements of people, animals, microbes, resources, ideas, and more shape our world. You can learn more about the initiative at migrations.cornell.edu, where you can also find relevant links from this episode. Follow us on Twitter @CornellMig. For Italian-speaking listeners, you can find excerpts from archive holdings and more information on the DiMMi initiative via the website and social media pages of the Italian National Diary Archive.

This podcast is hosted by Eleanor Paynter, ACLS fellow and migrations fellow with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The episode you've just heard was co-hosted by Elena Bellina, adjunct faculty in Italian at New York University. Voiceover was provided by translator and interpreter Isabella Corletto, thanks to support from the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Arnold and Anne Lisio Endowed Distinguished Professorship and Italian Language and Culture, at the University of Rochester. Our producer is Megan DeMint. Much of the podcast was produced at Cornell University on the traditional homelands of the Cayuga Nation, and we recognize Cayuga Nation sovereignty and the Indigenous peoples who have lived and continue to live on this land. Our music is “Basically Really” by Steve Fawcett. Migrations: A World on the Move is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Stitcher.