MARCO FEDI does not look unusual as he buys his coffee in Brunetti's, a swanky inner-city haunt in Melbourne. A Carlton habitue might even mistake him for a skip rather than one of the Italo-Australians who take their coffee at the bar. Solid, middle-aged and with little of his working-class origins on show, he does not seem very interested in la bella figura and is not very voluble.
Someone familiar with the kaleidoscopic diversity of Italy might recognise a typical figure from the Marches, the scenic region in central Italy where he was born in 1958. But even that is overlaid by years of working in multicultural Australia for private and government social services.
His excellent, lightly accented English, learnt above all in classes for migrants in South Australia, further obscures the Italian in him. Although he says that his experience since the 1980s has been typical of most migrants', he will also readily talk about his second-generation family and his happy life in Melbourne, whose quality of life he prefers to that of Rome.
As a man of the left he feels Australia is changing for the worse socially and politically but he believes that its multicultural experience has something to offer the world.
And yet, as people come up to him and shake his hand or nod as they do when they sense that he is "somebody", it is obvious Fedi is unusual.
He was elected this year to the Italian Parliament as the member for the Italian electorate of Australia, Asia and Africa. He ran on the centre-left ticket led by Romano Prodi, Italy's Prime Minister, who was elected in the wave of revulsion against the near-criminal neo-liberalism of Silvio Berlusconi.
Fedi sits on the foreign relations committee of the lower house in Rome. His election is a historical first. Italy alone has reacted to the novelty of a globalised world - where unprecedented mass migration has led to significant proportions of many national populations living far from the countries where they were born - by changing its constitution to allow its citizens to elect MPs from electorates outside Italy.
While other countries, including Australia, allow their citizens to vote in national elections while living overseas, they have not considered the idea of overseas electorates. The thought of an MP from a hypothetical electorate of New York City making laws in Canberra would boggle most Australian imaginations.
But neither Nino Randazzo, a former editor of the Italian-language newspaper Il Globo, who was elected to the Italian Senate, nor Fedi sees any contradiction. They represent Italo-Australians, Italo-Asians and Italo-Africans. They feel loyalty to two different and yet overlapping cultures, those of Australia and Italy. Both love and shuttle between the countries of their constituencies and Italy as they did for years before being elected.
They no longer feel like Hannah Arendt's heimatlos - those who had no homeland after World War II - but, like the most fortunate among us, have homes of the heart in many places. Randazzo, who is also from Melbourne, has even claimed on television that this makes them the first "world citizens", that is, individuals whose full, active political rights do not end at the borders of the state where they are citizens but extend to where they choose to live.
As Fedi says, what takes place has a two-way benefit, where what is valuable "over there" is brought back to the Asia-Pacific and what the Italo-Australian diaspora has learnt in Australia goes to Italy. He feels, for example, that the patrimony of multiculturalism of Australia ensured the integration of individuals such as him. It is invaluable and he hopes to take the message of that experience to an Italy that struggles to find ways to deal with its new migrants.
Of his election, Fedi says: "We united a community around the idea of political representation in the Italian Parliament and the idea of extended citizenship through the dream of a universal citizenship which would idealise the migratory experience and give it a non-political dimension."
Italo-Australians and their fellows in Asia and Africa felt it would be useful to have two "strong voices" in Parliament to lobby for changes in the area of citizenship, argue in favour of studying and training opportunities for Italians abroad and seek funding for cultural exchanges.
Underpinning the two-way trade in cultures is the reality of today's world, a world of globalisation that has brought all communities closer through rapid communications. These have ended the problems of time and space that separated countries and caused the sense of loss and alienation in past migrations.
All labour markets are now global. More than 1 million people have left Australia in the past 15 years to work overseas. How long they will stay overseas, whether they will still call Australia home, remain to be seen. What is certain is that in time most of these Australians, like their migrant forebears, will have several homes and even passports, like the Italo-Australians who migrated to Australia. Those million people know it is possible to have multiple attachments.
THE views of the Italian diaspora and the hard-learned lessons of those who have had to migrate to find work and a decent life are now likely to be heard in Italy. The voices of Fedi and Randazzo will be heard. Randazzo's side holds the balance of power in the Senate, and the Government is expected to take its opinions seriously.
Critics of the innovation of overseas electorates mutter darkly about no one being able to serve two masters. In Italy a housewife asked how "Australiani" could possibly know about the day-to-day problems of Italians living in Italy. Even on the left there are critics. Fedi counters that such people will eventually see that they benefit from a wider view of their situation in a global world, and the global labour market that migrants know best.
Who better to suggest policies for migration, for integration in Italy, than Italian migrants who know "where the shoe pinches"? Their second- and third-generation children know that integration is possible and that people who have two cultures are enriched, not impoverished. It is certain that they take a longer view than the politicians and the media that look no further than the next election.
Fedi's reply to the housewife is that her neglected fellow citizens living abroad have a wealth of comparative experience that no "on the ground" view can match. Not surprisingly, he deplores the emergence of an "island attitude" among Australians. Through its migrants, strong and successful Italian regionalism has been a model for a kind of development that has adapted to a global society where - through the internet, air travel and multiple loyalties - the notion of a homesick diaspora is being replaced by dreams of a world citizenship.
Italians voted left in the Australia-Pacific region. Are there lessons here for a Labor Party that, despite a significant Italo-Australian presence in its leadership, has a rank and file that still clings to a "new nationalism" whose theme song is I Still Call Australia Home, rather than trying to learn from what is done "over there"?
It is decades since "old" Australians made the hardship of leaving the homes of our fathers and mothers - summed up in songs of lament we no longer sing - harder still by taking a patronising attitude that migrants to Australia reap all the benefits from the exchange.
The writer Pino Bosi's rage at the treatment of "eyeties" in the 1950s and 1960s was allayed by the multiculturalism of the following two decades. The richness of the different cultural traditions imported with the migrants has long since been accepted and recognised in Australia. In an almost symbolic way one of Australia's leading chefs, Stefano di Pieri - an old friend of Fedi who also would be puzzled at any suggestion that he cannot love both his homes - now appears on television to read his poetry and talk of the next music festival he will organise in country Victoria with his brother, Sergio, one of Venice's leading organists. Together, the di Pieri brothers bring a rich European tradition to another world.
So today many Australians would nod on hearing that Fedi comes from the Marches: that is where they glimpsed an ancient church, the Duomo of Ancona, on the race to the Dubrovnik ferry and that is where the historic centre of Urbino has been made a World Heritage site that many tourists visit. A few more would know that the Marches were for centuries part of the papal states, where a solid working-class tradition emerged that included co-operatives and a little anarchism. They would thus have a sense of where the new MP is from and what he brought with him to Australia.
TODAY, as the novelty of the election of Fedi and Randazzo makes strikingly evident, the Italian and the Australian experiences continue simultaneously. Neither was left behind when they caught the boat or the plane to work overseas.
Maybe the first lesson is this: today we should learn to stop thinking that what takes place when someone migrates is an exportation of old traditions from one place into a new environment. No one "leaves old England" forever. And Italy was not left behind when migrant ships set sail. Migrants do not bring only a past with them.
The election of Fedi and Randazzo and their fellows from North and South America and from Europe reminds us that there is an Italy that is ahead of countries such as Australia in political innovation. Today Italo-Australians bring not a past but a future. The lessons to be learnt are not all one-way but, as Italy's leading political theorist since Machiavelli, Antonio Gramsci, would have it, they are "maieutic" - a two-way street.
Fedi admits that he learnt much more about information technology through being in Australia than he could have in Italy. On that level Australia has been a more progressive part of the globalisation of economies than Italy. Politically, however, his election marks a recognition of developments in a new world labour market, a coming to terms with contemporary human realities in a world of mass migration, a world where millions can and do have two, or more, homes.
Alastair Davidson is professor of human rights at the University of Wollongong.