Immigrants and Exiles

It can be easy to take for granted the closeness of significant spaces in the landscape of our heritage - we may visit churches where our grandparents were married, the streets our parents grew up on, the graves our ancestors rest in. For some, a thousand years of connection surrounds them. But for the children of immigrants, these places can become mythic with distance. Sometimes, even hostile. How can our parents' stories lead us to feel deep connections with locations we may never see? This week, Walter delves into the stories he was raised on and reflects on his relationship with Italy. 
 
Your hosts are Walter Musolino and Moreno Giovannoni. 
Technical production is by Laura Wild. 

Walter and Moreno go meta on their recollections of the past. Can creatives be trusted to give an unadorned statement of fact, or are Moreno and Walter simply slaves to the human desire to craft meaning out of moments in time? From the small joys of pissing on stars to urban exploration, our exile heroes analyse their memories under Carl Jung's theory of mythmaking.
 
Your hosts are Walter Musolino and Moreno Giovannoni. 
Technical production is by Laura Wild. 

Today, Walter and Moreno trace the aftermath of World War II - We are the products of everything that came before, and our movements in the present carve out new people, personalities and predicaments for the version of us yet to be. How do ripples in time shape how we live our lives and who we become? Moreno educates Walter on the consequences of history.
 
Your hosts are Walter Musolino and Moreno Giovannoni. 
Technical production is by Laura Wild. 

In this episode, Walter & Moreno discuss some of their most significant memories of childhood - their first trips to Italy. 
Together, they recall and compare the disparity of those formative experiences: the drama of travelling by sea, first encounters with true boredom, toothless grandfathers, emaciated aunts, the nighttime emissions of elderly relatives, and above all - the dislocation of returning to Australia. 
 
Your hosts are Walter Musolino and Moreno Giovannoni. 
Technical production is by Laura Wild.

In today’s episode, Walter and Davide Musolino continue the discussion about their music with Moreno who keeps arguing the case for the listener’s freedom to hear & interpret a song anyway the listener wants, without having to pay respect to the songwriter’s reasons for
composing the song. Backstories are argued over but always in the friendly spirit of sharing divergent opinions. Influential connections with migrant parents and families keep surfacing but also intimate, even disturbing, details become shared.

In today’s episode, one of two on the subject of music, we hear me - Walter - and Davide Musolino speaking about the songs we write as the founding members of an indie rock band called Man City Sirens. As anyone listening regularly would know, I am one of the co-producers of the podcast series “Immigrants and Exiles” together with my friend, Moreno Giovannoni. Moreno and I have spoken about his novels The Fireflies of Autumn and The Immigrants, beautiful books of wistful reflections and solace but also, the second, of socially and politically focused anger related to the complex world of the migrant. Now we’re expanding our horizons that little bit more to investigate the many and varied lives of the descendants of those same migrants as well. And this is where Davide steps in to bring some order and a cool head to the debate.

The chat you're about to hear was recorded in the small mountain town of Palombaro in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. It presents migration from the perspective of someone, Josh Arnold, a super successful young American businessman and entrepreneur from Arizon, who has come to Italy looking for a better life. After an unexpected heart attack a few years ago, he started out on a series of explorations to see what else the world has to offer a man who has basically everything except contentment. As it turns out, Italy is where he may have really struck it rich and in a way that money can't buy - though it still helps. 
 
Music: "Lonely Star” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

The chat you’re about to hear was originally recorded in Messina (Italy) late 2024 at the seaside home of Agata. Agata’s two daughters flew the family nest as young women 13 years ago and they’ve made London their home: clearly far, that is, from the home of their birth. This is the story of how their mother and father have been coping with an unavoidable abandonment. This is thestory of those left behind. Of course, you’ll be hearing a translation ofthe interview. My thanks to Rosemary Musolino for her contribution as the other voice.
 
Music: “Why Bother” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

Welcome back to another episode of the Immigrants and Exiles series recorded at the Beachcomber Café in St.Kilda. Today we hear about the early adventures of young Arthur in a country schoolyard, about the value of ‘bi-linguism’ in brain development but also how being cosmopolitan was a barrier to being socially acceptable or ‘integratable’. Inclusivity was, and still remains, largely elusive in a country like Australia that measures the worth of people by their resemblance to the cultural establishment.  At many levels - at the institutional and the popular - there continues a resistance movement against difference. New arrivals need to fit an old template.
 
Music: “Why Bother” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.

Welcome back to another episode of the Immigrants and Exiles series recorded at the Beachcomber Café in St.Kilda. Get ready for some history lessons on the impacts of war, on Italian repopulation of the planet and on citizen historians, all of which brings to light the colour and wonder of migration. Through stories retold and benign memories shared between generations, we hear how sentimental bonds are forged between the original adventurers and their descendants. But we also discover how the offspring listening are inevitablyinfected by an incurable disease: a niggling sense of their own displacement, of cultural deprivation and even loss of identity because part of them belongs elsewhere. And so, communicable nostalgia - an intense desire for a fictional place never experienced - is born. And grows.
 
Music: “Runaway” by Walter Musolino & Davide Musolino.