First love and Italian postwar migration stories

This chapter considers written memories and fantasies of first love as retold by Italian migrants in Australia in the late 1950s. These stories of first love were written in letters sent between 1957 and 1961 to Il Salotto di Lena, a weekly column of the Italian-language newspaper in Australia La Fiamma. In this column, readers were asked to tell a true story from their past. After strong editing, the best stories were published and their authors received a prize of £10. In this chapter, however, I will consider the original, unedited letters written by migrants, which are kept at the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales.