COML107 - Italy and Migrations: A Long History

This freshman seminar explores the history of migrations to and from Italy, from antiquity to the present, in order to reveal the complexity of Italian culture and to analyze Italian views of the world and the world’s views of Italy through a variety of documents, literary works, art, scholarly and news articles, and film. We will begin with the foundational myth of Rome out of Aeneas’ migration to seek refuge in a new land after the destruction of Troy (Vigil’s Aeneid), and we will move on to retrace Marco Polo’s trek from Venice to China (Marco Polo: The Description of the World) and Shun Li’s arrival from China to Venice (Segre’s Shun Li and the Poet). We will follow the Italian migrations to the United States before and after American Independence and Italian Unification in pursuit of the “American dream” (from Philip Mazzei, Jefferson's &quot;Zealous Whig&quot; to Crialese’s Nuovomondo – Golden Door and Scorsese’s Italianamerican), and we will witness the transformation of Italy into a new “America” for migrants from other nations (Amelio’s Lamerica, Melliti’s Io l’altro [I the other] and Crialese’s Terraferma).<br />
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