A Round-Trip Journey to America: Giose Rimanelli's "Biglietto di terza"

Abstract

Giose Rimanelli’s book, Biglietto di terza, is one of his least studied texts and, at the same time, one that has bewildered the critics and its readers for many years. Some believe that the narrative is the author’s autobiography detailing a trip to Canada to visit his family; others assume that he is in search of his American roots; and still others think that it is a travelogue of an Italian in Canada. A more penetrating study will allow the reader to delve into the intrinsic essence of the work and to explore, in collaboration with the protagonist, a physical, emotional, and metaphysical itinerary that takes the narrator from his native Italy to the coast of Canada, to finally return to where he started: Italy, effecting a complete circle from the Old World to the New, concluding, as he started, in the Old. To have a broad vision of the migrant reality, Rimanelli chooses to make the journey to Canada as an immigrant even though he is not. He uses his family’s migrant reality as a model for the immigrant experience. In this way, he becomes a living witness to a particular society: the destitute refugee in search of a better life in America than the one he left behind.