Geografia culturale e migrazioni. Le risorse. Linguaggio, mestieri e comunicazione dei lucchesi in America ad inizio XX secolo.

The Author focused on ethnic and cultural issues regarding the immigration of Italians from Lucca area in Italy, dedicating an attention to local ,original production : from plaster statues,to literature in dialect and to the analysis of published epistolary material. Emigration from Lucca has been studied since the second half of the 80s of the twetieth century, who have laid the foundations for future research and interpretation. The choice of sources was rather limited, but above all selective in terms of quality,considering that the personal material of emigration contains an enormous number of publications of little interest for the study of social and cultural dynamics. The Author, therefore, used every texts published about Italian and "lucchese" emigration. The use of texts in English has been useful to identify the process of Italian emigration described by American researchers, often descendants of the emigrants themselves, who have worked with first-hand sources untraceable in Italy. This gave different points of view, born in the cultural environment of another country, so that the Author was able to present a more detailed and in-depth study with the use of sources and essays never translated into Italian . Italians and Americans tend to have two profoundly different visions of the question : if on the one hand the Italians feel it as their own history and underline its nutritious and heartbreaking character, the Americans,while recognizing the inhumanity of certain aspects, frame it under the more complete history of emigration to the United States in its entirety, extolling the successes and narrating the lives of the emigrants as an arduous climb in order to achieve a final improvement which is naturalization and citizenship. This study wants to highlight the topic to allow the collection and conservation of the epistolary heritage of emigration in the many villages that exist in the province of Lucca. Also for this reason the Author has given ample emphasis to personal stories, because this work intends to focus precisely on the issue of the ethnicity of the emigrant, identifying his characters from production in a personal context . The emigrant, who was influenced by the politics and economy of his own country and of the host country, was ,first of all, an individual with a strong cultural background, clearly visible in material production and in self-expression.