With Memories the authors want to reinsert the story of Chinese migrants in Italy within the great flow to Europe occurred in the second half of the Twenties, showing how many of them had already been together in Japan, and how they left only following the violence spread out in the country after the Kanto’s earthquake, in 1923.
This work was born from a mixed, artistic and academic, commission focused on GeoHumanities promoted by the University of Padua and the Hollow University of London in 2019. Where it was impossible to recover direct evidences, we came up with a possible reconstruction based on the individual characteristics of a few protagonists of this migration, people we know well because of their subsequent European exploits and various traces left behind.

 Ciaj Rocchi (1976) and Matteo Demonte (1973) are illustrators, video makers and cartoonist.
In 2015, they published the graphic novel Primavere e Autunni (BeccoGiallo, Andersen Prize selection) and, in 2017, Chinamen, un secolo di cinesi a Milano (BeccoGiallo, Gran Guinigi selection) which is also a documentary with animated drawings and an exhibition which was held the same year at the Mudec, in Milan. Both graphic novels are translated into Chinese and published by Dangdang.
In 2021, they published La Macchina Zero. Mario Tchou e il primo computer Olivetti, and in 2022, Le stelle di Dora. Le sfide del Generale Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa (both Solferino). The latter is also a feature-length animated film produced by the Stato Maggiore della Difesa and the Struttura di Missione per gli anniversari nazionali of the Presidency of the Italian Council.
Since 2015 they have been editorial illustrators for «La Lettura» and «Corriere della Sera».

Daniele Brigadoi Cologna (Bolzano, 1967) is associate professor of Chinese language at the University of Insubria, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Research on Minorities (CERM). In 2005 he co-founded the Codici|Ricerca e Intervento social cooperative, and on its behalf he coordinated and carried out research, training and consultancies on international migration and cultural diversity. His main field of research is the history of the Chinese in Italy.

 Prologue. Stories from the cities, stories from the sea

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