Studi Emigrazione – settembre -1994 – n.115

The vast body of literature which has been produced by geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, historians and others on migratory processes is a reflection of the long history and multi-faceted nature of migration. The research materiai ranges from census data, passport records and passenger lists to the persona! testaments, sometimes very moving, of those who have left their native land. From the point of view of international emigration, probably no other country in the world has seen such a vast corpus of published literature as ltaly. Certainly no other European country has sustained such a massive emigrati on of its population lasting over a century, terminating finally in the 1970s. The crude parameters of this movement are almost too vast to take in: according to officiai figures there have been 27 million emigrants since the Unificati on of Italy and at least 9.5 million returnees since 1905 when records of return migration began (Rosoli, 1978).