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Italians from the World’s End
Italians from the World’s End is a collection of little known stories from far-away places, trying to answer aiming at answering the question: how could it be that an Italian would go to the end of the world?
Indeed, the best known and most common stories of Italians in the UK tell about London, the City and rarely cover much beyond Oxford, Edinburgh. Yet currently 100 new Italians register each month at the Italian Consulate in Edinburgh for Scotland and Northern Ireland, perhaps more even that did up to the 1930s when individuals settled as far north as the Shetland Islands, in the middle of the North Sea, at the latitude of Oslo. And still today, there are Italians to be found working in the Scottish Highlands and restaurants established on remote archipelagos, where you can still have dinner at ten in the evening, even if the last pub closed two hours before.
These stories are dispersed along the windy coast of Cornwall at the extreme south-west of the England, in the tiny towns of Wales, along the tracks going through lost villages on the Isle of Skye or in the Highlands. These are different stories, of artists on their personal search and young people escaping to the outer-limits of the United Kingdom. They are so far from the rest of Europe, physically and conceptually, one can say they are at the end of the world.
Stories