California Italian Studies

This article examines the response of Italian cinema in the 1990s and early 2000s to the phenomenon of mass immigration from the global south. It specifically focuses on the invocation of neorealism in order to mobilize a trope of semblance which compares new immigrants with Italian emigrants of previous generations, stating “they are as we once were.” However, the actual statistical record shows this trope to be a sleight of hand, a misremembering based on historical erasures that are so ingrained in Italian culture as to go unnoticed, and which feed upon long standing discriminatory hierarchies between the North and the South.