I’m
born in San Giovanni
in Fiore.
I live and lived a good part of my life in this
town.
However,
eighteen years of my life passed in other
places; I was also an
emigrant. For short periods, other
times long ones.
I’ve assisted at
the disintegration of the local culture,
at the urbanistic and territorial
disaster consequent to the phenomenon of the
mass emigration of our population, and,
especially, at the
absolute lack of rational programming of the
resources by the succeeding Municipal
Authorities in the last four decades.
The
description of such phenomenon can provide an
example of which serious problems are consequent
to the mass emigration, of the
difficulties inherent in the immigration
phenomena and
of cultural acceptance of the migratory
populations by the local population,
in the general process of today’s globalization.
At
the beginning of the last century a
migratory current of the Florensis started
towards the foreign countries which became like
a river in flood since the half of the Sixties.
The thousand of
billions of Lire’s of the wages of the
beyond eight thousand Florensis are
transformed in reinforced concrete in a
little more than ten years. A
collective madness braked out: Dr. Salvatore
INGLESE, Ethno-Psychiatrist, in that time
Director for many years of the local seat of the
Mental Health Centre, wrote an essay where he
analyzed this type of social psychopathology:
[...]
the relative richness deriving from the
wage-job gained by the emigrants was obstinate
to be petrified in deserted and abusive
dwellings that caused a serious imbalance in
the rational management of the territory. The
emigration hasn’t determined "in loco” a new
development, the web of the productive
structures or trading remained atrophic or
however slowed down. But the concreteness of
the wages revealed also the necessity to
contrast, turning upside down in its contrary
the anguish of the consequent vanishing by the
forced exodus. In this territory, more the
emigration is suffered like uprooting or
constrained nomadism, more new domestic
foundations are demarcated. The
more one is forced to the movement, the more
one digs in the cliff and a permanent
skeletal identity rises.
[...]
In
the Florense population don’t exist any
resignation to the exodus, to the MASS
EMIGRATION, nor acceptance of the
strategy of operated survival. The
exile from the catharsis of the reality is
revealed like suspension of the drama in the
vacuum of empty buildings.
The
choice of investment of the own savings, gained
with sweats and sacrifices, dictated by emotive
motivations and not strategically rational,
is individually and
socially a complete failure; in any
manner the Public Administrations and the
Technical Office didn’t brake this phenomenon,
in the contrary, with serious responsibilities
and disastrous consequences on the territory,
they regulated and addressed it typologically
carrying it to the wild construction of houses
all equal, all faulty, all useless and to the
building of a town that is not apt for living,
closed, with any possibility of breathing, made
up by empty buildings in great part not ended,
however uninhabited, with
any aesthetic, functional, economic and
social value.
Calabrians
Coal Miners in Monongah, West
Virginia,
1907
The
short description of the drama, of
the historical failure, in terms of development
on the territory of belongings, of the
individual and collective sacrifices of a whole
migrating population, that Florense, invite
to reflect on the need, essential nowadays in
times of globalization, of migrations on
world-wide scale of entire populations and
ethnos groups, to
resolve the sense of vacuum, loneliness,
diversity, of non belongings, that the
migratory process provokes in a human being
forced to abandon his land and his culture; existential
anguish that can carry and carries to deviations
of behaviours which, in any case, are neither
strategic nor rational.
We
of emigrati.it
are convinced that the research and the
valorisation of the roots, common to the
various Cultures, can contribute to
render the migratory experience of each
individual, like also of a social group or of an
entire population, less dramatic.
We
work on the research and the valorisation of
the heritage of the cultural roots,
starting from Caccuri,
from San
Giovanni in Fiore towards the world,
to the common
roots of every man, to the
higher values of the hospitality and the
fraternity between the peoples. emigrati.it
is born in San
Giovanni in Fiore * ‘because this
town’ has endured in a way more serious than
others the problems due to the mass emigration
of its population, in honour of the sacrifices
of our fathers and in order to build a surer
future to our sons, to the children of today,
those of tomorrow...
Thinking
to the children, to how many
experiences they will have to live in order to
be transformed in the men of the future, in
order to acquire knowledge, in order to become
and to be, as humanist and impassioned of
Cultural Anthropology I repeat myself: that a
human being acquires knowledge and culture
through a complex process, known precisely as enculturation,
which includes the instruction, the imitation
and the inference from the others behaviour;
knowledge and personal culture proceed from the
individual interaction with such social process,
today in continuous transformation and evolution
like the same individual; that
the individual knowledge belongs to a
cognitive process pertaining all humanity,
exists and have a meaning only because it’s the
expressive relation of an individual respect a
social group in a historical succession and
transmission of the Culture.
Every human being is thus
unique and each Culture is precious;
all the Cultures offer various and original
fields of investigations of the reality. The
preciosity of the cultural diversities is, for
us of emigrati.it,
a treasure to be kept carefully as the base
for any human development.
More
I travel, grow, work, become cosmopolitan, more
I tie to my origins, trusting in the
idea that the development of the Man consists in
the diversification of the Cultures, in
its exchange in a pacific cohabitation, and
not in their flatting imposed
with hunger and war.
Francesco
Saverio ALESSIO
