«Tutto è italiano». Gina Lombroso Ferrero, Travel Writing, and the Making of an Italian Empire in São Paulo.

This essay argues that Gina Lombroso Ferrero locates the basis for Italy's future imperial development in the economic force of Italian São Paulo. Her travelogue Nell'America Meridionale (Brasile-Uruguay-Argentina): note e impressioni di Gina Lombroso Ferrero (1908) depicts the numerous Italians who migrated to Brazil to work in the coffee fields not as exploited indentured laborers (colonos) but rather as settlers who, by triumphing over adversity, have brought glory to the motherland. In contrast to other Italian travelers to Brazil who quickly condemned the miserable conditions of Italian indentured laborers, Lombroso Ferrero locates in the labor of the colonos the making of an Italian empire. In doing so, she inadvertently reveals the overlap between the two meanings of the Italian word colonia, allowing us to reflect on these two 'colonial' processes not only as co-existing but essentially intertwined and mutually supportive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]