Images and stories of migration within contemporary culture in Italy are shaped by several interconnections between the past (memories of Italian emigration, Italian poverty and rural society) and the present (Italy's postindustrial and multicultural realities). Analysing different texts, this article explores how the construction of the ‘official memory’ of the Italian emigration is used both to recall an anti-racist and sympathetic reception of today migrants and to conceal the specificity of today's mobility. In this context, the temporal categories of Eurocentric modernity are functional to the maintenance of hierarchical differences between ‘self’ (Italian and European) and different ‘others’ (the migrants). Although the system of representations is articulated around traditional dichotomies between North and South, East and West, and self and other, the article shows the crucial role of ‘migrancy’ cinema. It offers new trajectories, alliances and exchanges, which are significantly represented through the multiple crossings that challenge the walls of Fortress Europe in the Mediterranean.
