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indietro
Emigration from Friuli Venezia Giulia to Belgium
Francesco Micelli
Emigration from Friuli Venezia Giulia has never attracted the interest of Friulian scholars of local history. The only relevant study was that carried out by Guglielmo Pitzalis in 1989 on the return to the valley of the River Natisone of those suffering from lung diseases and in particular, silicosis. It is useless at this point to conjecture on the reasons for this omission: it is more useful to plan a new research and to try to understand, for example, how the large Italian minority in the area of Charleroi live today.
Emigration controlled by the State concerned and the emigration of those who decided to do so themselves, social integration and work in the mines, national feelings and cosmopolitan habits: these, in our opinion, are the problems to be faced. The methods of recruitment, the contract clauses, the hardship of the work, the risk to their lives that our emigrants faced have at least already been noted. It is necessary to retrace the life of an emigrant in its entirety and for a period of time that is longer than the time he spent in the mines. The reasons many stayed in the host country were not only economic, the flows to and from Italy are not completely over. A similar prospect needs an approach which is not constrained to regional or national ties but rather coherent with the need to be cosmopolitan, European, Italian and Friulian, so that it will never be necessary again to lay a memorial stone (however noble that may be) to those who fell at Marcinelle where an Italian province remembers its fallen, in order to study all the mixed marriages and to understand the feelings of the latest generations. To listen to stories about permanent stays or returns to the homeland, questionnaires and life histories had to be researched as much in Italy as in Belgium to find out memories of the post war period and the reasons for subsequent choices. Too much attention to one’s identity risks – as has already happened – closing rather than widening one’s horizons, while a systematic comparison of migrant groups, of their nostalgia and expectations could better clarify the complexity of migratory movements.
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