Looking homeward: Publication in Italy (and elsewhere) of works about Americans and Italians

The writers here sometimes looked homeward, to Italy (but also France and elsewhere), to find a publisher who was sufficiently interested in the adventures of an Italian in America -- the very title of Adolfo Rossi’s very entertaining Un italiano in America -- published in Milan.

Writers looked to foreign publishers to provide publication, and possibly readership, more in keeping with the traditional view of book publishing and book production values to which the more highly trained among the Italian journalists in America gravitated.  Some, like the Piedmontese aristocrat Mayor des Planches, who was Italian ambassador to Washington from 1901-1909, always intended to return to Italy, and did so.  Publication in Turin of his Attraverso gli Stati Uniti – per l’emigrazione italiana occurred a good three or more years after his tour of duty was completed, and so he kept an admirable objectivity and cool demeanor toward the subject of his study. 

Cordiferro’s Ode alla Calabria, published in Buenos Aires in 1933, but reflecting a literary salon that had taken place in Brooklyn some years before, mirrored the broadly felt literary interest of the Italian diaspora wherever Italians might be in the writing of other emigrated Italians, and the global nature of Italian culture.