We feel at home, away from home’. Changing domestic and public spaces between Romania and Italy

This article discusses the concept of home-making, considered as a gradual process of appropriating space. Homemaking is a temporal process that accumulates over time as people become settled and feel they belong somewhere; the house per se must thus be considered not only in its physical dimension, but also as a nexus of social relations. Following the processes of migration, the methods and forms of construction change, both in the place of origin and the destination, just as the geography of the rural and urban landscape changes over time. This article analyses the home-making practices of Romanian migrants on the basis of more than eight years of ethnographic observations conducted between Marginea, a town of 11,000 inhabitants in north-eastern Romania, and Turin, a city of 900,000 inhabitants in north-western Italy.