Between 1870 and 1970 the migration of 26 million people from Italy produced an uneven geography of Little Italies worldwide. Migrants initially clustered residentially in many lands, and their festivals, businesses, monuments and practices of everyday life also attracted negative commentary everywhere. But neighbourhoods labelled as Little Italies came to exist almost exclusively in North America and Australia. Comparison of Italy's migrants in the three most important former ‘settler colonies’ of the British Empire (the USA, Canada, Australia) to other world regions suggests why this was the case. Little Italies were, to a considerable extent, the product of what Robert F. Harney termed the Italo-phobia of the English-speaking world. English-speakers’ understandings of race and their history of anti-Catholicism helped to create an ideological foundation for fixing foreignness upon urban spaces occupied by immigrants who seemed racially different from the earlier Anglo-Celtic and northern European settlers.

This paper examines the politics of urban space through a consideration of three ways Italians in Toronto, Canada, create, make claims to and express their belonging in particular neighbourhoods in the city. The article considers forms of claiming and colonizing space that are not overtly violent or confrontational with respect to other groups living within the plural city but, in effect, are assertions of power over particular places with which others must contend. The three forms encompass a range of scales, temporal duration and purposeful collective expression by Italians in Toronto, and they include the quotidian shaping of neighbourhoods, the calendrical colonizing of public spaces during religious and secular celebrations and the monument building that attests to the permanence of Italians in the city. Ultimately, these forms of place-making must contend with the larger forces of commodification and popular imagery that influence the spatial representations of Italians in Toronto.

Rather than focusing on how Italians share the neighbourhood with other groups, this paper examines some of the intra-group processes (i.e. relations between Italians themselves) that produced various monuments to Italian migration in Australia, Brazil and Italy. Through their distinct styles and formulations, the monuments reflect diverse and often competing elaborations of the migrant experience by different generations at local, national and transnational levels. The recent increase in the construction of such monuments in Australia is linked to the gradual disappearance of ‘visibly’ Italian neighbourhoods. These commemorations effectively transform Italian migrants into Australian pioneers and, thus, resolve moral and cultural ambiguities about belonging and identity by de-emphasizing difference (ethnic diversity) and concealing intergenerational tensions about appropriate ways of expressing Italianness. Similarly, the appearance of monuments in Italy is linked to an emergent ‘diasporic’ consciousness fuelled by Italian emigrants’ growing ability to travel to Italy, but also to the attempt to obscure potentially destabilizing dual identities by emphasizing (one, Italian) ‘homeland’.

This paper analyses the role of the Centro Scalabrini in London in defining a sense of belonging and identification for Italians in Britain. The essay broadens the conventional focus on how community organizations contribute to constructing an ‘imagined community’ for minority or migrant populations by suggesting that organizations are used as cultural objects and collective props for enacting and experiencing collective affective belonging abroad. The paper examines the processes through which community spaces themselves are constructed as scenes of ethnicity, for example, in the visual and narrative accounts of events found in the community press. However, rather than arguing that ethnic organizations simply reproduce an identity and culture, it is argued that the community centre offers intimations of ethnicity, as well as ‘intimate ethnicity’, for those who use it and move through it. As a locale in which Italians and other migrants can find themselves again (ritrovarsi), what the centre offers is not the continuity or reproduction of the old world; it is the production of a portable Italianness through traces that are filled with sensuality, with the bodily experience of contact.

This illustrated paper is the latest in a long series based on visual sociological research which I have conducted about how the meanings of neighbourhood spaces are changed by the agency of even the least of their inhabitants. Specifically, it attempts to demonstrate how the Italian-American character, or version of Italianness (Italianità), of four of New York City's most well-known Little Italies (Mulberry Street and East Harlem in Manhattan, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Belmont, Bronx) has been affected by the invasions of new and different ethnic groups. The spatial and semiotic logic of diasporic/transnational processes that have taken place over the course of a century is presented here in the form of scholarly and journalistic reportage, as well as photographic images. All these sources document and illustrate contrasting and changing demography, but here special attention is paid to commercial vernacular landscapes which play a major role in defining the ethnic (in this case Italian) quality of city neighbourhoods. It is also suggested that this Visual Sociological approach might have value if applied in parallel studies of how immigrants are changing the meanings of urban spaces in contemporary Italy.