Space mobility is a constant in world and people history. Migration phenomena have become an important feature and took on a global character while they have extended their destinations over and over. In Italy we have experienced a sort of turnaround, comparing to a distant past and, after decades of intense emigration, this country has turned into a centre of attraction and call-up.

Although it is difficult to get exact information about it and to lock up such a complex phenomenon as migration into a straight plan, nowadays it is necessary to know its trends and enclose them in a global analysis circuit. It is therefore possible to determine and picture its main features (paying attention to the words, of course) with charts an maps e carte that help us to highlight those main features.

In the module, the general part is followed by a close examination of Italian situation. This is meant to highlight how Italy plays a central role in Mediterranean waves of populations plot and its characteristic of “painted nation”. Italy is the main world centre of attraction of migrations from different places, nowadays. (Content 3 e 4). Umberto Eco (Content 5)is provocatively discussing right about this multiethnic feature, when he calls up students to take a stand and gets them used to claim his thesis. At last, after Italian President’s discourse (Content 6) and at the occasion of the International Migrant’s Day, we would like to put forward a subject connected to International Law, also discussing over a paradox Convention concerning the protection of migrant worker and their families rights and the fact that it hasn’t been ratified yet nor by USA nor by EU.

The theme is particularly vivid and heard by all people in Europe, because migration which is currently investing our continent, have radically changed the demographic composition and ethnicity of almost all countries, with important issues of integration, interaction, dialogue between cultures. The phenomenon is not new: in all periods of history, human communities have moved from their territories in search of more favorable conditions of life, but between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these movements have taken on particularly intense quantitative dimensions and very very complex and sometimes contradictory qualitative forms. Certain areas of Europe, in fact, after having been countries of emigration during the first half of the nineteenth century, will soon become a destination for waves of immigration from other states where the process of industrialization had not yet started and therefore less job opportunities offered . It is the case, for example, in Germany of the rural populations, particularly those over the Elbe, which particularly affected the agricultural cycles of famine of the ’30s / ’40s, leave in great numbers their villages and make the long journey to the American mirage. The same change from birthplace to the host country was also recorded in France, where the industrialization process is slower to take off than Britain or Belgium, where an economy still persists so strongly linked to primary resources. From the second half of the nineteenth century, these countries will draw, however, a large amount of labor more or less specialized, first by the countries of southern Europe and later also from other continents.

In the 19th century, industrialisation was established in many European regions. Factories were built, new railway lines were constructed and a number of new posts were created. To a small degree in the western districts of Tyrol, a large part of the Tyrolean population lived from the proceeds of agriculture. In the agriculturally less productive areas of the Upper Inn Valley and the Upper Vintschgau (area on the upper reaches of the River Etsch), the inhabitants were in a terrible predicament. Many families were no longer able to feed their children. As a result, every spring thousands of boys and girls went on foot into Swabia, an agriculturally rich area around Lake Constance, where they sought work as farming assistants for the summer. They offered their labour on the child labour markets in Friedrichshafen and Ravensburg. Now an old man, a witness at the time, Adolf Thurnes, remembers his time as a Swabian child thus: “At the child labour market in Friedrichshafen, the children stood positioned between ropes; the farmer picked up whichever child he liked the look of, lifted him over the ropes and took him home with him”.

In late autumn, the children returned home with the little money they had earned in their pockets. The migrations of the Swabian children ended around 1920 when the Austrian school authorities insisted on the observance of compulsory education.

Within the topic “the building of Europe” were developed eight modules covering the 1848/49, without any prior agreement between the partner countries’ research teams: a clear sign that this historic moment has been considered by all a node conceptual and historiographical essential for the establishment of a European koine. All treatments agree in considering the European events of this period a very complex and heterogeneous phenomenon: time of nationalities’ construction, civil and political liberal aspirations and revolutionary “spirit”. Another analogy is that the movement has invested almost by contagion throughout Europe, taking different forms and manifestations, but with a fundamental common denominator: the demand for constitutional guarantees and greater political participation. It was therefore considered a crucial step of the long road towards the full realization of modern democratic systems. For this reason the argument is proposed and discussed in all educational programs, in conjunction with the civics or social studies.

La rivoluzione di febbraio in Francia dà l’avvio a quella serie di sollevazioni popolari che in pochi mesi si diffondono in tutta Europa. Mentre i cittadini francesi chiedono maggiori diritti e eguaglianza politica, nell’area italiana e tedesca, ancora politicamente divise, le richieste popolari riguardano l’aspirazione alla realizzazione di uno stato unitario. Nell’Europa orientale, Cechi, Ungheresi, Polacchi e le nazionalità slave dei Balcani, che vivono sotto il dominio di dinastie straniere, prendono forma gli ideali di indipendenza nazionale. Due anni prima dello scoppio delle sollevazioni della “Primavera dei popoli”, in Polonia, il cui territorio era diviso fin dal 1795 tra Austria, Russia e Prussia, viene pubblicato a Cracovia un manifesto per la Costituzione di un Governo Repubblicano nazionale, in cui si incita la popolazione a sollevarsi contro le autorità austriache in nome di quella comunanza di sangue, di lingua e di religione che costituisce il sacro principio dell’identità nazionale. Per gli stessi ideali patriottici, già a partire dagli anni ’20/’30, gli italiani si erano mobilitati per realizzare la loro indipendenza dal dominio austriaco e per costituirsi in un unico stato nazionale, nonostante le ripetute sconfitte che il movimento aveva subito. Anche all’interno dell’Impero Asburgico la situazione è in ebollizione: la sua dimensione multietnica pone la questione della coabitazione tra lingue, culture e religioni diverse. Durante il ’48 la maggior parte di queste “nazionalità” aspirano alla libertà politica e alla realizzazione della loro completa indipendenza. I confini dello stato imperiale non coincidono con i “confini” culturali dei popoli che lo abitano. Tutti queste differenti ed esplosive tensioni si concludono però, alla fine del 1848 e ancor di più nell’anno successivo, con un nulla di fatto. Ovunque la repressione dei governi dinastici interviene per distruggere e combattere i movimenti “liberali”, anche se negli anni successivi gli ideali del ’48 troveranno il loro compimento nella realizzazione dell’unità italiana, tedesca e nel crollo definitivo delle monarchie assolute.

The Spring of Nations is a term used to describe a series of revolutionary and national upris-ings, which occurred in Europe from 1848 to 1849. The concept of “nations” refers to societies seeking to participate in the ruling, to social classes looking to improve their living conditions and to nationalities struggling for autonomy, independence or unification within one state. During the Spring of Nations three revolutionary trends were thus revealed: related to political, social or national system. Revolutionary explosions of 1848 – 1849 covered almost the whole of Europe. There were no instances of it in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and in the Russian Empire. On the Iberian Peninsula only peasant revolts took place. Revolutionary movements in one country affected other nations. Information about events spread rapidly, leading to more uprisings. Many participants of the Spring of Nations were active in several countries.