Return mobilities and Italian youth transitions: new meanings around adulthood

ABSTRACT

Part of a larger ethnographic study on Italian youth mobilities, this paper investigates the transitions to adulthood of young returnees who have gone back to Italy after a period of living and working in Australia. Adopting the ‘mobile transitions’ approach, we illustrate the ways in which mobility affects transitions to adulthood. We suggest that upon return these transitions unfold like a palimpsest, where the old texts are layered over with new ones, unsettling conventions about adult life and disrupting assumptions that return is a final stage in the transition process. New meanings around adulthood emerge in these young Italians’ mobile experience that continue also after return. We explore this through their aspirations for the future and their renegotiation of family relationships. Return for these young movers means bringing home a new perception of their current and future selves and especially of their role within their family of origin and Italian social and political culture. This is significant if we consider that Italy is the ‘country of the long family’ (Cavalli, A. 1997. “La lunga transizione all’età adulta.” In Giovani del nuovo secolo. Quinto rapporto IARD sulla condizione giovanile in Italia, edited by C. Buzzi, A. Cavalli, and A. De Lillo, 38–45. Bologna: Il Mulino), where the youth condition is characterized by a delayed acquisition of autonomy and the consequent late assumption of responsibility and adult roles.

KEYWORDS:

• Return mobility
• transition
• Italian youth
• palimpsest
• family

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In quantitative terms, the return rate can be calculated on the basis of the percentage ratio between total Italian returnees and Italian expatriates between 2002 and 2019 (www.istat.it). In this period, a total of almost one million and two hundred thousand Italians left the country to live abroad, with a return rate of 56 per cent. It is noteworthy that for the same period the return rate from Australia is lower at 37 per cent. This percentage is even lower, at 25 per cent, if we consider the return rate from Australia of Italians between 18 and 39 years of age.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DP170100180].