Narratives of the Italian Diaspora From The Comino Valley To Scotland: Voices of Self-Identity and Belonging

Among the migrants of Italian origins settled in the United Kingdom from the 19th century onwards, the community native from the Comino Valley in Southern Lazio has produced a significant number of narratives on their ancestors, their ties with the home country, and issues of transnational identity. This research aims to analyse how migrants from the Comino Valley to Scotland have represented themselves and have recounted their diasporic experience through narrative writing. Specifically, it focuses on a corpus of memoires and autobiographies of three Italian Scottish writers from the valley : Eugenio D’Agostino (1938), Mary Contini (2002), and Anne Pia (2017). Through a corpus-driven approach, lexico-grammatical patterns are investigated to identify the discourses Italian Scottish migrants from the Comino Valley created in their narratives. This work intends to contribute to a more linguistic strand of Anglo-Italian Studies interested in the narrative analysis of migrant discourse, as well as to provide solid foundation for the (re-)discovery and dissemination of the Italian British intercultural heritage.