Albinati and Veronesi's fictions of 1989 and non-fiction of 2018. Italians-migrants thirty years later

In contemporary Italian literature Edoardo Albinati and Sandro Veronesi share the primacy in having proposed a changed representation of migrants by offering insights into the living conditions of two migrant communities in Italy at the end of the 1980s, the Filipino community in Veronesi’s Gli sfiorati and the Polish community in Albinati’s Il polacco lavatore di vetri. A closer analysis, however, may note that on the migrants’ topic the two writers are further united in non-fiction. In 1989, they gave voice to foreigners who corroborated the historical change of the Italian republic from a country of emigration to a country of immigration. Thirty years later, in 2018, with a common and different reaction they addressed a watershed in the history of foreign migration in Italy, that is the ‘Aquarius case’, the NGO ship and the 629 shipwrecked migrants who, in June 2018, were denied disembarkation in Sicily. An emotional reaction, on Albinati’s part, to highlight the cynicism of the institutions, as he writes in the political pamphlet Cronistoria di un pensiero infame. Embodiment reaction by Veronesi, to underline the border with the inhuman, as he writes in the political pamphlet Cani d'estate. Four books of different genres, two novels and two political pamphlets, which nonetheless are united by the same Italians-migrants binomial and whose publications delimit a thirty-year journey with respect to the alterity.