Preface [Migrating across times and cultures. Metaphorical images of migration in the U.S. and Italian newspaper discourse between the 20th and 21st centuries]

The author discusses theories of metaphor in discourse, reviews significant contributions to the study of the linguistic representation of migrants in the media and describes procedures of metaphor identification and categorization. The overall aim of the investigation is to capture through metaphor snapshots of US and Italian society and politics at two different points in time with a view to detecting similarities and differences. Though the study finds that emerging pictures show more similarities than the different histories of the countries might lead to predict, Italy as a country with communities left by migrants as opposed to the US as a country receiving migrants in the 1900s does produce different, positive metaphors. This investigation also confirms that metaphorical mapping is deeply rooted in everyday life and experience.