So far, I have established that the articulation of a dual sense of identity might shape transnationality or the maintenance of transnational ties. However, the sense of attachment to the country of origin is not only related to the degree of people’s mobility. To support this argument, I explore the sense of attachment and identification with places from the perspective of those who are less mobile. For example, Domenico, a participant introduced in Chapter 4, revealed that he identify himself as Italian, and that he did not feel to belong to the context of migration. However, Domenico does not define himself as a ‘seasonal migrant’ like Alfredo, nor spend short sojourns in his home-town like Christine, Manuel and Riccardo. Domenico said:
‘I don’t have anything in Italy. Not a house, nor any longer relatives. All people of my generation passed away. Nothing has been left. It has been many years now that we don’t go to Italy. But, of course, you do not lose your identity.’
(Domenico, Translated into English, March 2016)
In this extract, Domenico refers to the difference between attachment to places and identification to them. A lack of attachment to the place pre-migration is justified in terms of both material possessions and social connections. This conditioned for Domenico the possibility of being mobile, such as traveling back and forth between different countries, as the participants in the previous sections do. This last point became significant in the course of the data collection, as many of the other ageing migrants with whom I worked were not able to adopt a transnational lifestyle.
There seem to be many reasons why people may lack mobility across countries. In the majority of these cases, this was the perception around the accessibility of places. In particular, the physical constraints of ageing seem to be the most significant reasons for not adopting a transnational lifestyle. For instance, for Carolina, a participant introduced in Chapter 4, her sense of ‘home’ was in Britain, and she identified much more with British, rather than Italian culture. During an informal conversation in the Bingo hall, she told me:
‘C: I would love to go to Italy, of course I would love to travel. But, when I think that I have to do all these travels by plane. I have to arrive in London, or Manchester to take a flight, and I can’t. I can’t travel any longer. I don’t have energy to take the train from here, then take the flight from there. And I am alone. Before, when I was younger I did it. With my husband, I travel back and forth many times, now I can’t so, […] I made my Italy in here.’
(Extract from fieldwork diary, Carolina, December 2015) For Carolina the accessibility of transport is an obstacle to her mobility. She describes herself as no longer being mobile, compared with her lifestyle in younger age. Moreover, being an older widow she viewed traveling as being more difficult compared to when her husband was with her. Similar to Carolina and Domenico, many of the other older Italians who participated in my research explained a lack of mobility in later life, as due to difficulties in terms of resources and possibilities: such as economic, time, health, physical constraints of ageing, or other commitments (i.e., many considered themselves linked to places because they needed to care for their grand-children, as shown by Teresa in Chapter 4). Many more were worried about no longer having the possibility to travel.
From the two examples discussed above, I wish to emphasize that place attachment and place identity are not influenced in all cases by the mobility of older people after retirement age. In other words, it is not the level of mobility that shapes how people identify with the places of origin. In fact, Domenico is not an older migrant who adopts a transnational lifestyle; nevertheless, his sense of identification with the places he inhabited pre-migration is very high. In contrast, Carolina who expressed a high sense of attachment to and identification with Britain, rather than Italy, cannot travel any longer because of what she perceives as the constrains of ageing. Nevertheless, for her the context of migration sustains processes of cultural identification. Therefore, these two contrasting examples may lead to consider the reality as more nuanced and multifaceted as described in the previous section. From these examples emerge a significant insight for this research: to explore place attachment and identification with places, it should not been taken for granted that these are relate to the degree of mobility or transnationality. In fact, some of the other participants in this study, regardless of how frequently they travelled between
countries or maintained social ties, expressed their attachment to Italy in different ways. In this respect, it is worthy to drown on the concept of transnational ‘ways of being’ and ways of belonging’ as defined by Schiller (2004). The scholar illustrates how ‘transnational way of being’ refer to all quotidian acts and everyday practices that shapes the life across borders (as the four example in the previous section have illustrated). She also define with the term ‘transnational way of belonging’ the identity of people who reach out distant places whether or not they live within transnational social fields. This generally take place through memory, nostalgia and imagination (Schiller, 2004, p. 458). Such as the example of Carolina, who expressed her sense of attachment to the place she migrated from, by saying that she recreated her Italy in the UK. To support his viewpoint, in the following section, I provide further examples of ageing Italians who kept their home ties without being mobile. To do so, I look more closely at the role of material culture within the private domestic sphere in the context of migration, as manifesting place attachment and sustaining processes of cultural identification.