摘要：Edmondo De Amicis gained his national and international literary fame thanks mainly to his novel, Cuore (Heart of a Boy, 1886), but he also wrote several travel books, which were well received by both critics and readers. Among them, Sull’Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889), a book in which the author recounted the journey he made in 1884 on the boat Nord America headed towards South America. De Amicis visited Buenos Aires where the newspaper Nacional had sponsored a series of his lectures on the Italian patriots of the Risorgimento. On his way back to Italy, he also stopped in Rio de Janeiro – a brief visit which resulted in a short story, “Il sogno di Rio de Janeiro,” included in the volume Nel Regno del Cervino (1902). De Amicis’s publications on South America, however, present a different approach compared to the rest of his travel literature. They lack, in fact, the wealth of observations and details which normally filled the pages of De Amicis’s narrations of far-away and exotic places. Traveling to South America made De Amicis think more about Italy and Italians (many of whom had emigrated to this continent)than the local people and places he saw there. What he wrote, therefore, about South America was not meant to describe unfamiliar places, but rather to present Italians living in Italy with an opportunity to reflect on a phenomenon, migration, which, for De Amicis, was still unfamiliar to them and, yet, which was not so distant from the realities of unified Italy as many bourgeois readers imagined.
关键词：De Amicis. Travel literature. Immigration. Risorgimento.;De Amicis. Literatura de viajes. Inmigración. Resurgimiento italiano;De Amicis. Literatura de viagem. Imigração. Ressurgimento italiano.
