Female migration in a changing world. Eastern Europeans in central Italy

This paper focuses on a region of Central-Adriatic Italy, the Chieti-Pescara metropolitan area. The presence of a fairly significant number of foreign women and a large number of Eastern European women in the area corroborates the hypothesis of the existence of an Adriatic model of female migration . This paper will investigate the main reasons, characteristics and problems relating to the migration of women from Eastern Europe. This paper is organized as follows. In the first chapter, we will devote our attention to the political and economic changes taking place in countries that formerly had a planned economy, specifically Albania, Bulgaria, Poland, Rumania and Ukraine. The second chapter highlights the main characteristics of female migration in the post-Wall era. The third chapter develops an analysis concerning foreign women in the Chieti-Pescara metropolitan area, based on the results of fieldwork undertaken in 2007. The fourth chapter outlines the profiles of Eastern European women of various nationalities derived from analysed data.