Lifelong Learning Programme

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission.
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Educational Package

Ch 2. Partire è un po’ morire?
(“To leave is a bit like to die”, an Italian proverb).

1. Before leaving: what you left behind, what you were looking for.

Numberless artistic, literary, cinematic, journalistic accounts and important sociological, anthropological, psychological thoughts have described and analyzed the symbolic complexity and the thick emotion of the migrants’ experience. The Italian proverb chosen as title of this section intends to suggest the contradictory feelings knot associated with the choice of leaving one’s own land, where the fundamental childhood and youthful experiences have been lived. At the same time it wants to point out the difficult, insecure balance between what one misses and what one hopes, between what one leaves behind and what one brings with him/her (sometimes with funny misunderstandings: for example, a central-American young girl once told that, since she wanted to keep something of her own land within herself , she spent her last night before leaving for the far away Italy eating …mandarins!) [read more]



Routes - Copyright 2009 - This project has been funded with support from the European Commission

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