This is a modified version of a paper delivered at the IV Convegno Internationale Da Ulisse a ...Il viaggio nelle terre d'oltremare, Imperia, Italy, 9-11 October 2003. It will be published in the Atti del Convegno, in 2004. Nothing can be reprinted or cited without the permission of the author.

Abstract: A distinction is made between the writer who travels to Italy and the one who immigrates. Looking at five Anglo Saxon women writers including the Ligurian resident Annie Hawes; Mary Taylor Simeti, Sicily; Iris Origo, Florence, Rome, Lerici; Shirley Hazzard, Capri and Naples, and Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Parma the subject matter of writers who choose to stay and identify with Italy is analyzed.

Professor Massimo Bacigalupo in a comment made as chair recalled how he, as a child, said to his brother, after he realized they were speaking to each other in English after months of being in America, "we must speak to each other in Italian or else we will be lost." What a succinct and eternal perception his remark reveals. What links are contained within a language: the family as well as the community who speak it; what loss is sustained should one have those links broken. Inside of a language one basically belongs; outside of it one is cut off. By taking on life in a new language, one begins to assimilate and, by being assimilated, creates certain conflicts as well as privileges should the balance shift away from the mother tongue. The immigrant who writes, as opposed to the traveller who writes, faces a basic technical issue inside narration: to whom is he or she writing: the people in the new language or the old?

We have seen in presentations at this conference--from the archaelogical signs left by voyagers who formed colonies along the Tyrannean coast, to the sociological differences and hierarchical distinctions revealed among Croats who absorbed different waves of immigration in one small city on the Adriatic, to the differences among people who settled peacefully or by force in Liguria--that there are many enriching ways to view the impact and signs left by cultures or individuals reaching Italy from elsewhere. My topic can be described as how many different subjects emerge from the impulse to write once one has travelled to Italy and decided to become a resident. First, I would make the distinction between the traveller and the one who stays. Within the latter group, exiles and immigrants are very different phenomenon. Within the motives for immigration, thus staying in Italy, there are many intensities ranging from marriage to seeking a country in which to better oneself or in which one is free from war. Further focuses can sharpen and show other realities by adding duration, gender, place of origin, or the motive of the pleasure of living in a culturally rich land The Anglo-Saxon traveller to Italy came, as Dr. Johnson said, because anyone who hopes to be considered educated needs to see Italy or remain "conscious of an inferiority." And many travellers hoping to be educated, including Keats and D H Lawrence, also travelled to Italy for its Mediterranean warmth: its healing powers in pre-antibiotic days. They came for the cure which held vast physical, psychological and spiritual experience. Many remained even in death, as if their very flesh and bones needed to become one with the land. Some artists, as recently as Joseph Brodsky, an immigrant without a real home except within his language, asked to be buried in Venice, put to rest in an eternal setting, open to the sea and lapped by thousands of years of history.

We all remember Ezra Pound and how his experience in Italy at some point crossed over into politics and fantasy. His experience points to a person who is transformed, by or through residence. Pound's appropriations and identification with Italy as an artistic and political place led to his capture by Americans after WWII, since his loyalties to Fascism seemingly betrayed his American citizenship. The US military put him in a cage near Pisa, where he was accused of treason, until a committee of doctors had him committed to St. Elizabeth's hospital, a mental hospital in Washington, DC. Pound's poems assume a new axis, madness or politics aside, based on the classical images and viewpoint he absorbed during his Italian experience, when the English language crossed all borders and was reinvented by him. Many writers, one might say all writers who ever stopped in Italy, take something away from this peninsula and graft its images, experiences, myths into his or her own work, effortlessly broadening and deepening their ranges. From Jorie Graham to Charles Wright or Charles Tomlinson, their Italian experiences have been invariably transcribed into modern English poems. These transcriptions fertilize English's literary roots. But today we are looking at women writers who stay and in this sense are immigrants. We are trying to see the difference between the traveller who writes and the "immigrant." I would like to cite four responses as well as examining my own. The impression gathered from the work of these writers is that non-fiction prevails as a response to asserting and sorting out one's reality in relation to a new land and altered identity. Fiction may well be a genre that comes into play if and when the original impulses to describe an immigrant's reality have been exhausted. We will look for signs of this transition in adaptation. The Ligurian writer Annie Hawes, whose work falls into a genre which has been called the great escape: lives described for their fellow countrypeople, giving the "real" flavor of a new place seems to have reached this cross-roads.

Mary Taylor Simeti, an American who came to Sicily because of marriage, basically integrated her two lives and languages by writing first about her island as an archaeological and mythological place. Persephone's Island, using a narrative that is ordered by the calendar and her own travels to various Sicilian cities, has become a classic that explores women in myth, Greek influence on the island and Simeti's own daily life. Simeti also has written about Sicilian cooking as well as a journey in which Constance, Henry V1's Queen, makes her way to Sicily in the middle ages. In all cases Smetti uses history and tradition as ways of identifying with and using her Sicilian life in order to explain her own existence to English readers. Simeti, as one who stays, attempts to transmit Italian subjects that integrated her as well as transformed her. She stays at a relative distance from analyzing politics or invading, as subjects, personal daily relationships. Although she approaches the problem of the Mafia in her year long exploration of Persephone's island, it is not a determining element in her narrative. She is telling a story of her own life as a part of a larger story of women beginning from ancient Greek myths found on the island. These stories in some way are well known to Sicilians, as are Italian dishes, so her narrations, are discoveries in English, taken from her new knowledge of herself. In the book on Queen Constance, Simeti includes herself, but as a native. In this book she is no longer a foreigner. She appears as a wife who cannot take more than two weeks out of her normal Italian life to recreate Constance's year long journey. In identifying with Constance she wants to say something powerful about the immigrant and her long trial of migration: the noble and pious woman who travels to Sicily to join her husband and gives birth along the way, but Simeti's approach to this subject never quite catches fire. To tell it more vividly she would have to have more historical information on Constance and cut closer to the bone in describing the unspoken losses which remain largely unstated in her own years in Sicily. Although she identifies with the queen immigrating to Sicily, the check-points remain intellectual, largely researched, rather than felt. As a reader, I would have liked some clear lines of identification to justify the parallels: even a few days of physcially sharing her journey by walking might have added a vivid connection. Simeti shares insights about Constance's world but because so much is sheer speculation or imagination, the reader feels curious to know more about a journey that remains distant. The lack of documentation is bad luck, not in any way her fault. But the narration suggests a subtext about that loss of evidence, the difficulty of finding what her subject means. Many of the breaks and truncations, while not spelled out, lend the impression that Simeti wants to explore the unromantic reality of women's lives, even those of queens, but is constricted by the rules of the ostensible narrative she has undertaken. Without knowing where this talented writer will go next, this book seems to have led her to a watershed where she experienced, in some way, a profound sense of loss which she could not explore for its personal implications. We can only speculate that Queen Constance's harrowing journey to Sicily stirred Simeti's personal memories of what it means to immigrate and the impact of its sacrifices. The issue of being an immigrant and the topic of identification or identity seems to have raised its complex head.

Iris Origo, who had homes in many parts of Italy including a wonderful villa overlooking the sea in Lerici, was born of American, English and Irish nobility. Her father, seeing the disastrous effects of nationalism at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as having the privilege and possibility to act on his ideas and dreams, wanted to raise his daughter in a country where she had no roots, no claim to country. She grew up in the Villa Medici in Fiesole, and eventually married an Italian Marchese. Identity, though, for the young woman, since no one in her family of origin had any claim to Italy, was a deep, painful issue. Language and schooling were certainly key elements. The mixture of realities, life in cross-culture, became a topic for Origo, when she finally needed to define herself through writing and research in "order to keep sane." The tragic death of her son forced a deep and dramatic assessment of her place and identity. San Bernardino, The Merchant of Prato, and her own experience of civil war from a civilian standpoint, War in Val D'Orcia, are some of the powerful and intelligent works she wrote, attempting to integrate her Italian experience into her English speaking and writing life. She wrote a biography of Leopardi, of Byron and his illegitimate daughter Allegra. She wrote using topics from both cultures as subjects. Her impulse was to absorb, to give back and transcribe intellectual realities. She never wrote in Italian, except for one book which was a portrait of an Italian friend, Else Dalloglio. Allthough she was perfectly fluent in Italian, English remained the language in which she took up the pen and tried to reach others. She, in a far more definitive way than Simeti, eventually found herself writing a sort of autobiography, where truth and fiction, reality and how to narrate it are all themes which reflect, in part, her experience of living in two cultures. In her partial autobiography, Shadows and Images, we see the need to put more pieces together, integrating the two cultures in a present tense that is not literary but social.

Shirley Hazzard, along with her husband, Francis Steegmuller, had the experience of many English writers, who, without consciously choosing it, lived in Italy within a colony of AngloSaxon literary people who, because of common interests and their own achievements, integrated with Italians from all social strata. Origo's experience was similar, but far different because of her initial social rank and her marriage to an Italian, as opposed to an Anglo Saxon. In a phone conversation with Shirley Hazzard, although the topic was the book she had written about Graham Greene on Capri and the literary life surrounding that relationship, she could not praise enough the depth and sturdiness of Neopolitans and her interest in them. She overflowed with perceptions of what she had gained from her many years of associations with that part of Italy. Hazzard, who was originally from Australia, made many comparisons about how southern Italian lives differed from Americans' lives. The sense of learning from Italians who have lived authentic and often difficult lives works its way into writing done for English reading audiences once integration, as opposed to observation, has begun to take place. Her novel The Bay of Noon, recently reissued by Picador, is a brilliant and sympathetic exploration of Naples and intercultural relationships. Naples is beautifully evoked and the city is a catalyst,"the city worked on us; and when we met, it was as if to measure, against the supposedly fixed point of the other, the distance it had brought us...." As the Anglo Saxon character, Jenny, matures, she loses her sense of innocence. Hazzard sees this positively as a benefit from living in an old place. Jenny celebrates Naples' complexity, instead of mourning for England where "nothing could seem as alien as the life of indignation and Sunday roasts that I had left behind." Hazzard seems comfortable exploring the growth that takes place by taking distance from home. And she explores the alchemy in fiction. In fiction she finds a place to balance and explore, quite different from non-fiction narrative.

Annie Hawes' lively book, Extra Virgin, about her experience in Diano San Pietro was definitely written for English speaking audiences. It, however, tries to capture her experience as lived. Indeed, in telling the stories of the villagers and of her adventures along with her sister's as they acclimated themselves to this Ligurian village and took up the life of tending olive groves, the narration assumes a focus of telling the people at home about the natives as well as herself. I have read in an interview that Hawes did not give away Italian rights in her book contract. Her book has not been translated. Of course, I don't know but it may be that she fully realized that should her book be read in Italian, her freedom, her cover, her point of view inside the village would change. If she ever imagines herself writing for Italian consumption she will also have to see herself as one of them; the very stories she chooses and their novelty will change. By taking a step towards a different identity and identification through language, her relationship to her subject will be quite different: because the immigrant cannot remain a fixed person when taking on the other and the new language.

Perhaps one hundred years ago, the immigrant, crossing a body of water as great as the Atlantic, only returned to her place of origin once, if ever. So the meaning of the voyage was different. But in any and all cases, the struggle with identity, what to tell and what to leave out, changes from the moment the writer, the immigrant, realizes that the subject is now no longer simply descriptive, simply telling the people at home about the natives. When one's sense of self as part of the narrative shifts, waivers, and fights for ground which lies in both languages and both countries, the reason for writing comes more deeply into question. Us and Them is mixed and reversed. Writing, then, in English in the kind of writing Annie Hawes does so well, the genre of escape among the natives, shifts. When one has to find an inner and essential relationship in the other language, join in the community, the topic and point of view become as fluid as water itself. James Joyce in his stream of consciousness approach to Ulysses undoubtedly reflects the turmoil of language and identity once one is writing from memory in a foreign land about another place. Writing from memory is very different from describing difference between oneself and the place one has settled.

In staying in a place and writing in what is one's mother tongue, many strategies are possible. Annie Hawes, since she has stayed longer than she ever imagined in Liguria, no longer can simply tell stories about the natives. She has become too much a native herself to find the subject of difference sufficient. It is at this alchemical point that one finds new questions as a writer living outside of one's language but also fully inside the gates and literary traditions of Italian. I have found after twenty-three years of living in Parma, outside of my language and yet never more firmly within it, that my being different has long ceased to be a topic. As I understand more, I have tried to build communities and literary strategies from my immigrant experience. I have formed writing groups of people who are immigrants of many sorts, with many different kinds of experiences and needs. Witnessing is not just observing but also telling with an eye for empathy, injustice, new arrangements. I encourage my bi-cultural groups, or people who are looking for ways to express themselves to take up the pen to save memories as well as to explore their meaning in light of the present. After having written a memoir, Mother Tongue, an American Life in Italy, which steps into the choppy stream of consciousness: of loss, memory, everyday life in two languages, I have moved on into the new territory and language of alchemical transformation. It is to fiction that I turn--the present day world of a changing global Italy, where instead of Italians immigrating out, foreign immigrants are flooding in. For the first time, after working to integrate and sort meanings and values in my cross-cultural identity, always using non-fiction and the extreme truths of poetry, I feel the freedom to invent. I feel solid enough as an amphibian, living on Italian soil and writing from the oceans of memory and soul, to create a specific world among characters brought together from different worlds. I feel the urge to express a new order within the form of the novel: a non-hierarchical sense among characters, showing process and a narration where characters with different values and points of view living in a specific place are equally free to define their identities. By writing about contemporary and personal searches born from love and loss, I am collecting the buzz and a patchwork of particulars from a world that if it does not exist is being made. While I am writing in English, I am drawing the imaginary world where a crack shows us how other worlds begin and end.

—Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi is at work on a novel with the working title, A

Day in the Now of Toscanelli's Ray.