Seite - 44 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Band 1/2015

44 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage asked. “No there they wouldn’t let me, but to go upstairs inside the ship was no problem. ” Lisa cusiniello, born 17 february 1926 in Apice (Province of Beneveneto), was called by a sister-in-law to Argentina who told her family that in Argentina one would live very well, and travelled in 1954 on the Belgrano with a group of twelve relatives (including her three children – one more daughter was born in Argentina, father-in-law, and several brothers of her husband). She didn’t want to go because her husband already worked in Switzerland and earned well, and they worked land as sharecroppers. “I didn’t want to go”, she told me, “We lived well in Italy. My father had worked seven years in the US, and bought land.” She was sea sick during the travel and at the beginning didn’t speak Spanish – “here they say aceite (oil), the Italians say olio”, her daughter, present at our conversation, jokingly interjected. “What did you think about Argentina, what expectations did you have? how did you imagine Argentina?” I asked her. “I don’t know what I thought, I didn’t think anything, I wanted to go back to Italy, and if I could have flown I would have flown back! Leave the family, leave everything, here was nothing!” Whilst in the previous story the emotional pull and nostalgia for the home left are so strong that Lisa cusiniello wanted to “fly back” (thus crossing in an inverse movement that ocean once more which Stefania Devoto in section II wanted to put in between herself and an oppressive situation back home), in the following story of Antonia Vertuccio, the ‘staying behind’ remains a vignette of temporariness, halting but not hindering the travel party to emigrate. Eventually it is a doll, in curious alliance with the child staring at it (who would also see its own image in the glass of the shop window), that stays behind – ultimately signifying what is forever lost. Nélida cimino (born in Saladillo, Prov. of Buenos Aires, 1946), and in 2014 president of the Italian Association of Saladillo, told me the story of her mother, Antonia Vertuccio (1922 – Fig. 1. Ticket for Nélida Cimino’s mother, Antonia Vertuccio, 1933. Photo: Arnd Schneider, 2014.