Il Messaggero

The documentary Il Messaggero, directed by Pete L. Ferraro, recounts the story of the director's father, Pietro Ferraro, an Italian immigrant from the village of San Pietro in Guarano, in the Southern Italian region of Calabria. Pietro arrived in the United States with the last significant wave of Italian immigration following World War II. In Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania, he became a respected member of the local Italian American community. The documentary does not simply offer the story of an individual's migration but makes use of this life to portray a whole transnational community. It aptly shows the challenges, faced by every diasporic community, of keeping transnational connections alive through the use of available recording technologies. And, finally, it raises important questions concerning the preservation of the memory of migration within younger generations of Italian Americans.The film opens with the image of the protagonist, Pietro, making wine with his feet in a bucket of grapes. This image evokes Pietro's roots and can be read as a metaphor of the connection to his hometown in Calabria. This is also a poignant image of the film's main concern: how to stay connected, how to stay grounded through the process of migration. Ferraro proceeds with a narrative technique that is reminiscent of Elsa Morante's novel La Storia (1974). In Morante's masterpiece, the story of a woman and her little son is interwoven with the great events of history, that is World War II. Morante alternates between chapters written in an objective and journalistic style, highlighted in italics, that summarize the deeds of the great men of history, and chapters written in a proper novelistic style in which the focus is on an ordinary woman and her struggle to survive the war with her son. In this way, Morante weaves together the great events of history and individual experiences. Ferraro operates in a similar mode by mixing archival footage of newsreels that tell the great events of history, from the Fascist period and World War II to the liberation of Italy by the Allies. These archival materials produce a point of view that seems objective but is rooted in the place of arrival: it is history as seen by an American. However, the crucial contribution offered by the documentary is Pietro's point of view, which is not only the story of his own migration but that of his community.In fact, Pietro was passionate about recording technology. In the US, he produced many home movies devoted to the life of his Italian American world. Before leaving Italy, he had the idea to go from house to house in San Pietro in Guarano, asking people if they had a message for him to take to their relatives who had emigrated before him. In this way, he accumulated around one hundred recordings of the inhabitants of San Pietro, ranging from the comical to the dramatic. We witness the joyfulness of people experimenting with the technology, as well as older individuals sending heartfelt messages to loved ones they have not seen in decades and will probably never see again. These recordings are the core of Ferraro's documentary, and they deliver its most touching moments, weaving together the stories of these diasporic families. Toward the end of the documentary, Ferraro rightly suggests that these recordings should be archived at the Smithsonian and made available to historians for scholarly research.The history of these ordinary people is deeply transnational; these are stories shared across the ocean between two villages, one in Calabria and one in Pennsylvania. The anthropologist Vito Teti, himself a native of Calabria with a family history of emigration, coined the terms partenza (leaving) and restanza (staying) rather than uprooting and rerooting to describe the process of migration as a pendulum between two worlds. The migrant subject does not—and should not be forced to—erase their own past in order to embrace a new culture but exists in an in-between space where the two places mix and coexist (Teti 2022). This documentary portrays the employment opportunities offered by the United States, exemplified by Sharpsburg's main employer, the H. J. Heinz Company. Despite hardship, the immigrants were able to start their new life. At the same time, the immigrant community tended to recreate in the new country an image of the old village. The main symbol of this tendency is the construction of the Madonna of Jerusalem Church, named after the patron of San Pietro in Guarano, Santa Maria in Gerusalemme. Like the church, the immigrant community also brought with them the ritual processions and the religious practices of their Italian village. This phenomenon has been studied by Teti in his Stones into Bread, which focuses on the Calabrian community in Toronto and shows the importance of these rituals for immigrants in maintaining a sense of personal and collective identity (Teti 2018). By repeating the rituals in the new context, the immigrants access a transhistorical dimension—the religious experience—that can help them make sense of the experience of migration.The subsequent generations of Italian Americans, like the director Ferraro, instead confront this experience with new technological tools. The technology functions as a narrative prosthesis that is useful, in a sort of Proustian way, to gain access to a past that seems forever lost. This is the function of the digitalized recordings to which Ferraro, with his smartphone, has his family members and friends listen. We see here how these second- and third-generation immigrants react emotionally to hearing, after decades, the voices of their lost grandparents. These voices were originally recorded by his father, Pietro, who, before leaving for the United States, returned to Calabria from Florence (where he had moved) to record on tape the messages from the people left in the village. He brought the recordings to Sharpsburg to allow his friends and neighbors to hear the voices of the Italian community. In this way, through the documentary, we too gain access to these important documents; we too hear the voices of the people left behind. Through the initiative of Pete L. Ferraro, the tapes are digitized and we see the director go around Sharpsburg today, offering these recordings to the Italian American inhabitants of this town. It is common for them to ask, right away, if they can have the recording. What is exceptional is that Pietro, the director's father, had already had the idea to use this memory tool—the tape recordings—back in the 1960s. Perhaps the fact of being the last member of his family to leave the village made him realize how traumatic the experience was both for those who leave and those who stay. The coincidence of sharing his first name with the name of the town, San Pietro, gives this detail an almost novelistic intensity.Il Messaggero is a beautiful and moving documentary that can offer people from immigrant backgrounds an insight into the existential complexities of migration. In addition, it offers scholars of Italian American studies—and other fields in ethnic studies that deal with the legacies of migration—insights into how to bring their disciplines into the future, in dialogue with memory studies, now that we are further removed from the generation that experienced the migratory process firsthand. It can also provide models to elaborate the critical tools of memory studies that can be useful to create collaborations with historians of other, more recent, migrations. In particular, the film highlights the role of media, old and new, in making sense of the lived experience of leaving and staying. Finally, the film offers a convincing case for making such recordings available in a scholarly archive so that both the public and academics may access and study them.

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