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This chapter assesses how the efforts by the Italian state at certain moments to slow processes of repatriation by requiring guarantees of work and housing proved merely stopgap measures. Despite worries about the potentially destabilizing effect of introducing impoverished Italian repatriates and refugees into an Italian peninsula devastated by the war, the Italian government worried equally about the corrosive consequences of lengthy residence in refugee camps on its inhabitants, as well as for neighboring communities. This prospect carried with it the risks of ruination not only of the generation of adults displaced by the war and the collapse of fascist empire but also of succeeding generations raised in the camps. Examining debates about how to reclaim the children of Italy's lost empire for the nation after 1945, the chapter explores such questions through the prism of resettlement policies and refugee housing. In particular, it asks whether these efforts can be read as instantiations of the famous fascist projects of land reclamation and thus as attempts to reclaim and render productive the ruins of the fascist project.

The chapter shows that the appreciation of so many Italian Americans for the material rewards that American liberalism had delivered to them was used as a transnational Cold War weapon—a means to convince Italians in Italy to choose the promise of American consumerism over communism in a crucial political moment in which the “homeland” was at the forefront of the clash between the two worlds. The chapter emphasizes how public campaigns like the mass letters and donations for Italian war relief that Italian Americans sent to their relatives in Italy to convince them to vote for anticommunist parties in the watershed elections of 1948 had in fact a double purpose: one international, influencing the self-determination of Italians in Italy and keeping the country in the U.S. sphere of influence; and one domestic, proving to other Americans that (despite indications or fears to the contrary) the levels of material consumption Italians had achieved in America had decisively won them to the cause of capitalism and Americanism. Furthermore, Italian Americans involved in organizations that worked to repeal the National Origins System quotas and reform American immigration policies set out to prove the fitness of Italians as both new immigrants and citizens in the 1950s and 1960s. One way they did so was to demonstrate that Italian immigrants who came to the United States after World War II adopted lifestyles that reflected the culture of mass consumption that prevailed in the United States.

This chapter examines the Italian factor in Spanish politics between the ‘liberal triennium’ (1820–3), when Mazzini first showed an interest in Spain, and his death in 1872. The first part looks at the lessons Mazzini drew from Spain's liberal and patriotic struggles in developing his ideas about insurrection and popular warfare, and assesses the impact on Spain of the influx of Italian Carbonari refugees from the failed revolutions in Naples and Piedmont in 1820–1. The second part considers the influence of Mazzini on Spanish social and political thought during the 1830s and 1840s. The third part explores the impact of Mazzini's ‘action’ strategy, ideas of democratic internationalism, and news of the unfolding Risorgimento on the ideology and practice of the Spanish Democrat party, from its foundation in 1849 until ‘La Gloriosa’ of September 1868, the revolution that brought down the Bourbon monarchy. An epilogue charts the responses of Mazzini and Garibaldi to the constitutional experiments and political rollercoaster of Spain's ‘revolutionary sexennium’ (1868–74).

This concluding chapter explains that despite Italy's spectacular postwar economic growth, Italian officials repeatedly invoked the twin specters of Italian surplus population and the pressing needs of its “own” refugees to argue for Italy's unsuitability as a country of permanent resettlement. In light of the complicated entanglements between the international and national regimes of refugee assistance, it is no coincidence that the Geneva Convention that laid out the definition of the international refugee came into being during the same period as major Italian legislation that consolidated the Italian state's responsibilities to its own displaced citizens. Nor is it coincidence that as a signatory to the Geneva Convention on Refugees, Italy was among those few states that adopted the geographic reservation exclusive to European refugees. Moreover, the arrival in the 1950s and 1960s of Italian refugees from the territories of other decolonizing powers merely reinforced the Italian government's stance that its priorities for assistance must lie with its own citizens. Even with the close of Italy's formal decolonization in 1960, the classifications for migrants coming from the lost territories—repatriates and refugees—possessed continuing salience.

This chapter highlights the challenges of providing refuge across the Empire. Following the cases of Italian refugees on British Malta and the extradition proceedings against American fugitive slave John Anderson in Canada, it examines how the government balanced the demands of local authorities and international allies against a metropolitan public insistent that the colonial authorities honor the nation’s core obligation to protect the persecuted. In each case, officials did their best to mollify domestic public opinion. While officials decided that they could not override the decisions of the local authorities, the rapidity with which they acted on behalf of foreign refugees evinced the far-reaching power of this normative claim at midcentury. Refuge was not a legally encoded status; yet, normative claims for refugees were fast approaching the stature of a natural right.

This chapter discusses Étienne Cleirac's commentary on the first article of the Guidon de la mer (The Standard of the Sea). In brief, he says that the Jews expelled from France invented marine insurance policies and bills of exchange in order to salvage their assets when fleeing to “Lombardy,” that is, to northern and central Italy. From there, Italian refugees exported the newly invented financial instruments north of the Alps, where bankers and moneylenders were called “Lombards,” a name eventually given to a public square in Amsterdam. Cleirac's merging of these spaces has the effect of tracing a direct line between fourteenth-century Lombards and seventeenth-century Amsterdam and makes pawnbroking appear contiguous with the most sophisticated forms of financial credit developed during the sixteenth century. This chronological compression is crucial to Cleirac's rhetorical strategy of making medieval Jewish moneylenders, the object of scorn and prejudice, interchangeable with the international merchant-bankers of the seventeenth century.

Hitler annexed Austria to Germany on March 15, 1938. Erwin Schrödinger, in Graz, soon regretted having applauded this and fled to Dublin. Stefan Meyer pre-emptively resigned his professorship in Vienna. Marietta Blau, discoverer of cosmic-ray disintegration “stars,” immigrated to Mexico. Polonium expert Elizabeth Rona immigrated to America. Renowned Lise Meitner escaped to Stockholm, where she received little scientific or personal support. Mussolini’s Fascist Italy adopted Nazi racial policies and enacted anti-Semitic laws in the fall of 1938. Bruno Rossi, dismissed from his professorship in Padua, immigrated with his wife to England and then to America. Emilio Segrè relinquished his professorship in Palermo and immigrated with his wife and young son to America. Enrico Fermi, his Jewish wife Laura, and their two children, went to Stockholm where he received the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics and then immigrated to America to begin what Laura Fermi called the process of Americanization.