Resources
There is a scene, in an Italian film from 1961, that has stayed clearer than many things seen since. A young woman with a suitcase, a train pulling away from the South, and an absence that stays a wound long after the last platform is out of sight. Anyone who lives suspended between two worlds recognises it almost immediately, even without knowing the title yet. Emigration, before it becomes geography, is already something else, underneath.
I am not the first to try to put this in-between space into words, and I certainly will not be the last. Film, books, poetry: some have tried with a camera, some with a language learned as an adult, some with a single line. Here is a small collection of the works that, to me, name it best. It is not meant to be complete, and that feels right. It is a selection, made with care, of pieces that were already bearing witness to this condition long before I started writing about it..
Italian film
La ragazza con la valigia / Girl with a Suitcase (Valerio Zurlini, 1961)
Aida lives an emotional emigration before it ever becomes a geographical one. The South stays a wound that no train can fully undo. It captures uprooting at the exact moment it begins, long before it turns into a story you have to explain to anyone else.
Nuovomondo / Golden Door (Emanuele Crialese, 2006)
A Sicilian family gives up everything for early twentieth century America. It has been described as a journey of the soul more than a historical exodus: the new world, before it is a place, is a dream reshaped by the eyes of the person leaving.
International film
Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
Two people adrift in a language and a city they don't fully understand, and somewhere inside that disorientation, something that still recognises itself.
Between Two Worlds (Emmanuel Carrère, 2024)
starring Juliette Binoche
A writer presents herself without revealing who she really is, in order to tell a world that isn't hers. A film about what it means to live doubly, even if only for a while.
Books
Strangers I Know (La Straniera) by Claudia Durastanti
A story that moves between Basilicata and Brooklyn, between Rome and London: the feeling of being a stranger everywhere and, at the same time, at home nowhere in particular, told by someone who has lived it since childhood.
In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
An already established English language writer moves to Italy to learn how to write all over again, in another language. It reads almost like the exact mirror, reversed, of so many stories I hear: leaving a language that feels safe to inhabit a new one, with all the difficulty and discovery that comes with it.
Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman
The book that more or less opened an entire genre, the language memoir. At thirteen, moving from Poland to Canada meant not just a new language to learn, but an entirely different way of being in the world.
Poetry
Confine donna: poesie e storie di emigrazione, edited by Silvia Rosa
An anthology of women's voices, where geographic, linguistic and emotional borders keep folding into one another.
"To Live in the Borderlands Means You", by Gloria Anzaldúa
(from Borderlands/La Frontera)
It isn't about Italy at all, and yet the concept Anzaldúa calls Nepantla, the in-between space where the tension never quite settles but where transformation also becomes possible, might be one of the most exact descriptions ever written of that particular limbo.
If one of these reaches you somewhere you didn't know you still needed reaching, that might be worth sitting with for a moment, before going back to everything else.
©2026 Marianna Trezza
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