At past ECER conferences I explored cultural plurality (Bauman 1999) and its relevance for Intercultural Education by focusing on Italian minority groups, imagination and identity, and schools’ cultural complexity through ethnographic and narrative research. For ECER 2021 I would like to further elaborate on Italian cultural plurality by presenting the narrative I collected from an Albanian who, as still a teenager, tried to migrate to Italy in 1993, and eventually succeeded in reaching the shores of Puglia a year later. Now in his middle age, every Saturday he drives and parks his fridge-van in the usual neighborhood square, and sells his handmade cheese to a considerable number of customers. Being one of them, but a newcomer, he introduced himself and we started a conversation on migration, Albanians and on his forefathers, the Arbëresh, I had studied (Gobbo 1977, 2002, 2019). Then the idea to collect his narrative emerged. The story he has so far narrated concerns not only his 1993 dangerously adventurous sea travel to Brindisi, but also his learning experience of language and craft (cheese making) in a farm in Campania, and his successive move to live and work in a small town in Veneto. Here he first worked at a local cheese farm, and then, in 2013, he established his own “laboratory” where he handmakes cheese. G. Z. can certainly be considered a successful person, who “moved on” as so many of his co-citizens did at the end of the communist era in Albania, when the first impressive migrations started in the early 1990 (cfr. Carletto, Davis, Stamini, Zezza 2006; King, Pirach, Vullnetari 2010; Vullnetari 2012; Forlini 2017), but who - as he stressed - also “holds on” the family values and ways learned from his Albanian parents who now live near him thanks to his decision to have them close to him and to his own family.

G. Z.’s “passage” from Albania to Italy was the first step toward his successive, and successful, learning and working experiences, thus it will be necessary to place it within the wider migration scenery characterizing Albania, and particularly “the explosive nature of the exodus after 1990 (…) [when] boats turned into human mountains bearing down on the ports of Bari and Brindisi” (King, Pirach, Vullnetari 2010: 6). As researchers point out, “migration is perhaps the single most important political, social, and economic phenomenon in post-communist Albania, and has been a dominating fact of everyday life in the last decade. … [S]ince 1990 approximately one-fifth of the total population has left the country and is living abroad. (…) Migration, whether rural to urban or international to Italy or Greece, has become the most common livelihood coping strategy in the country, and serves as an important escape valve for unemployment and other economic difficulties brought on by the transition to a market economy” (Carletto, Davis, Stamini, Zezza 2006: 768). A further interesting aspect of the narrative of G. Z. concerns how he learned the Italian language and became a competent cheese maker - namely as an apprentice who looks and listens with close attention to what his “teachers” say and do - and evokes the “legitimate peripheral participation” theory of Lave and Wenger (1991). 

The methodology combines a limited participant observation of the interactions between G. Z. and his customers at the counter of his fridge-van, and the collection of his narrative and how it is made into a story. Narratives and stories are relevant to an intercultural discourse that, by giving voice to the researcher’s interlocutors, aims to access how people understand themselves, develop and interpret the events of their life, present their point(s) of view (cfr. Scheffler 1991; Gobbo 2004). At the same time a story implies a listener (even if only one, cfr. Wolcott 1994) who – being in this case a researcher - is also the one who triggers the narrative and will propose her own interpretation (cfr. Linde 1993; Olagnero & Saraceno 1993; Kearney 2003).

I plan to point out how this person, a full participant in Italian society and economy, stresses the cultural and emotional importance of “holding on” to the values and ways he learned while growing up in his Albanian extended family and that he would like to pass on to his children.

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