Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy (original) (raw)
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Environments of Italianness: for an environmental history of Italian migrations
Modern Italy, 2021
Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of material...
This volume aims to investigate the complex theme of social mobility in medieval Italy both by comparing Italian research to contemporary international studies in various European contexts, and by analysing a broad range of themes and specific case studies. Medieval social mobility as a European phenomenon, in fact, still awaits a systematic analysis, and has seldom been investigated iuxta propria principia in social, political and economic history. The essays in the book deal with a number of crucial problems: how is social mobility investigated in European and Mediterranean contexts? How did classic mobility channels such as the Church, officialdom, trade, the law, the lordship or diplomacy contribute to shaping the many variables at play in late medieval societies, and to changing – and challenging – inequality? How did movements and changes in social spaces become visible, and what were their markers? What were the dynamics at the heart of the processes of social mobility in the many territorial contexts of the Italian peninsula? Contributors: Frederik Buylaert, Sandro Carocci, Simone M. Collavini, Maria Elena Cortese, Bianca de Divitiis, Massimo Della Misericordia, Christopher Dyer, Serena Ferente, Andrea Gamberini, Sam Geens, David Igual Luis, Isabella Lazzarini, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, François Menant, Giuliano Milani, Pierre Monnet, Giuseppe Petralia, Alma Poloni, Olivetta Schena, Francesco Senatore, Alessandro Silvestri, Lorenzo Tanzini, Pierluigi Terenzi, Sergio Tognetti. Sandro Carocci teaches Medieval History at the University of Roma 2. Isabella Lazzarini teaches Medieval History at the University of Molise. viella historical research www.viella.it
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This paper studies the evolution of internal and international migration in Italy over the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. Notwithstanding Italy’s large international emigration flows, most Italian migration has been inter-regional, with rural-rural, rural-urban and urban-urban migration systems expanding in geographical scope and complexity over time. This paper analyses the interplay between internal and international migration, revealing four distinct patterns of (i) regions where internal migration always dominated and that turned into the destinations of internal migrants in the early-nineteenth century; (ii) regions that were initially characterised by strong international emigration before evolving into important destinations for internal migrants, (iii) regions that transitioned gradually from sources of to destinations for international and internal migrants and (iv) regions that largely remained sources of international and internal migration. Overall, thes...
2017
One consequence of the globalization of the modern world in recent years has been to focus historical interest on human migration and movement. Sociologists and historians have argued that mobility is much more characteristic of past historical eras than we might expect from nationalistic perspectives. This paper aims to contribute to this subject by surveying some of the evidence for mobility in central Italy, and by examining its implications for early Rome. I will focus on the plebeian movement, normally seen in terms of an internal political dispute. Our understanding of the ‘Struggle of the Orders’ is conditioned by the idealising view of our literary sources, who look back on the early Republic from a period when the plebeians provided many of the key members of the nobility. However, if we see the plebeian movement in its contemporary central Italian context, it emerges as much more threatening and potentially subversive. The key plebeian tactic, secession from the state, is often regarded as little more than a military strike. Instead, I argue that it is a genuine threat to abandon the community, and secessions can be seen as ‘paused migrations’. This paper also considers two other episodes that support this picture, the migration to Rome of Attus Clausus and the Claudian gens, and the proposed move to Veii by the plebs.
The Iron Age in South Italy: Settlement, Mobility and Culture Contact
In a study concerned with understanding the types of population and modes of contanct in the multiple ecosystems of Iron Age southern Italy, ranging from the Greek poleis of the coastal flood plains to the Appenine mountain regions of Calabria and Lucania, it is necessary to examine the contexts carefully, as each culture or cultural or social group and every region may react differently to contacts with other cultures. Particularly instructive in this respect is the picture that emerges from the Ionnian coast between Taras and Sybaris and its immediate hinterland, where it is possible to compare and differentiate realities that are not necessarily homogeneous or fully standardised. This paper discusses three different contexts along the Ionian coast, namely L'Amastuola, Incoronata and Francavilla Marittima, where the traditional reconstruction of the settlement dynamics, as proposed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, saw the presence of the Greek as a disruptive element which shattered a static indigenous situation and that led first to the conquest and subjugation of the indigenous inhabitants who lived around the immediate hinterland of the colonial settlements, and then resulted in full-blown inter-ethnic conflict. This perspective interpreted the clear traces of transformations between the eight and the seventh centuries in the indigenous settlements around the area later occupied by the Greek chorai as evidence of local communities succumbing to the impact of the Greeek arriva. In this paper, I will first discuss this traditional reconstruction, with particular attention to the inland regions of the Appennine mountains, before considering mobility and cultural contact in the Italic world and exploring the settlements and developments of indigenous communities between Iron Age I and II.