Since the time of the Roman conquest, in 43 AD, Italians have always been present on British soil, with bankers, inventors, artists, musicians, scholars, businessmen alongside thousands of immigrants who escaped the poor farming lands of Italy. Thanks to their genius and creativity they brought innovations and influenced British culture and society across the centuries. This course is a journey into Italian immigration in Britain, from the Lombard community in London in the Middle Ages, to the lives of personalities such as Guglielmo Marconi, Antonio Panizzi, Dante Gabriele Rossetti, and more recently Charles Forte, and many more. 

Knowledge and Understanding:

• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of Italian immigration in Britain;
• Display understanding of how Italians influenced British culture and society;
• Contextualise the key events discussed in the course in terms of their place and role in British history/society.

Intellectual Skills:

• Demonstrate a basic knowledge of the underlying concepts and principles associated with the study of history.
• Initiate, undertake and articulate a basic analysis of historical information.
• Develop explanations and support them with evidence.
• Communicate, in both verbal and written form, the knowledge and understanding acquired on the course, and to be able to distinguish between myth and reality.

Discipline Specific (including practical) Skills:

• Identify strengths, weaknesses, problems, and or peculiarities of alternative historical interpretations.
• Initiate, undertake and articulate a basic analysis of historical information.
• Deepen understanding of the broad themes and developments considered in the course through the analysis of a historical source or sources.
• To research, plan and structure history essays and/or projects.
• To recognise, evaluate and interpret different types of historical evidence.
• To develop, at a basic level, subject-specific and critically-discerning information literacy skills. 

This module is taught in 10, two-hour sessions, delivered on a weekly basis.

• Tutor-led sessions: these introduce the basic information to the students, and will form the bulk of provision. Hence there will be basic seminar-style sessions with tutor leading with talk and PowerPoint presentations during the first part of the session as basis for group discussion and questions and answers in the second part. Students will be invited to read up on relevant topics for homework including specific passages.
• Discussion and group work: where appropriate, students will work in small groups to apply what they have heard in the lectures to a given case study. Students are asked to reflect critically on set questions and to contribute their own ideas. The discussion and group work will enable the students to think critically and contribute to the debates and topics presented during the lectures.
•  The discussion-led sessions and the tutor-led sessions will be supplemented by internet resources available to the students via Learning Central.

Academic Skills:

By the end of the period of learning, the typical student will have:

• found relevant resources in the library and online;
• assessed the reliability of different sources of information;
• demonstrated a critical approach to academic texts.

Transferable/employability Skills:

By the end of the period of learning, the typical student will have shown that he/she can:

• work effectively as part of a group;
• present an argument, accurately, succinctly and lucidly, and in written or oral form.
• time manage and organise study methods and workload;
• gather, organise and deploy evidence, data and information; and familiarity with appropriate means of identifying, finding, retrieving, sorting and exchanging information. 

1. Papal Nuncios, monks, artists, merchants, bankers and explorers in Britain in the Middle Ages.
2. Literati and maestri d’arte at the court of Elizabeth and her successors
3. The Risorgimento and  the passage from élite migration to popular migration
4. Giuseppe Mazzini and the Italian exiles in London
5. Antonio Panizzi and Dante Gabriele Rossetti
6. Guglielmo Marconi and Maria Montessori
7. The birth of the Italian community in London
8. Italians in Scotland and Wales
9. The British-Italian community through the war
10. Italians in Britain today. 

Terri Colpi, The Italian factor. The Italian Community in Great Britain, Edinburgh and London: Mainstream, 1991.

Umberto Marin, Italiani in Gran Bretagna, Roma: Centro Studi Emigrazione, 1975.

Centurione Scotto Boschieri F., Italiani a Londra. Da Cesare a Forte.Ediz. italiana e inglese(bilingual edition), Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2012.

Lucio Sponza and Arturo Tosi (eds.), ‘A Century of Italian Emigration to Britain 1880-1980s’, The Italianist, 13 (1993), 7-96.

Sponza, Lucio, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988)

Giovanna Farrell-Vinay, The London Exile of Don Luigi Sturzo (1924-1940), HeyJ, XLV (2004), 158-177.