Migration and integration in Giulio Angioni

Abstract

Giulio Angioni’s third novel, Una ignota compagnia, published in 1992, breaks the mould of fiction containing characters from the extracomunitario community. Before this, migrants to Italy from outside the European community, when they appeared in fiction, were never cast as central characters. Now one of the central figures of a novel is a Kenyan, Warùi, whose experiences in modern urban Italy are seen as running parallel and being strikingly similar to those of a Sardinian ‘migrant’ to the mainland, Tore. Angioni’s democratic and progressive aspirations for the equitable integration of extracomunitari and other outsiders into the Italian nation are expressed, among other ways, through optimism of a linguistic kind. The style in which he tells the stories of Warùi and Tore is an experiment with a sort of plurilingualism that is seen to be in tune with, and is in fact the vehicle of, the vision of integration which is at the very core of the work.