ABSTRACT
It would be just as well to begin by asking ourselves what chance there is for us to end up like the protagonist of Fante’s novel. There’s no lack of reasons for concern. In good old Europe, as Bandini would put it, there has been a signifi cant infl ux of immigrants in recent years. Countries with a long tradition of emigration have found themselves insensibly turned, almost without them realizing it, into countries of immigration. Countries with a population conditioned, homogenized even, by centuries of living together, with common cultural and religious characteristics, or at least with differences polished by habit, have suddenly found themselves living cheek by jowl not with one foreigner, a fi gure that excites curiosity and in general benevolence (like Pocahontas), but with foreigners en masse. Many have had the unnerving sensation, a quite novel one for them, of fi nding themselves
the sole native occupants on board a bus or other means of transport whose passengers are all immigrants. Or they fi nd themselves on a street frequented only by immigrants. The sense of disorientation, or even unease, that they usually derive from such an experience is not due merely to the mass character of the phenomenon, but also the consciousness that these people are not tourists: in other words, they are not in transit, but are here to stay.
