Ethos italico
The journey in reverse
Bianca Zero left Genoa for Buenos Aires, like thousands of Ligurians a century ago. Except she went to act, and she doesn't like mate.
In Buenos Aires the fans of Boca Juniors are called xeneizes, which in dialect means Genoese, because the La Boca neighbourhood was built by Ligurians who landed at the port in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bianca Zero, Genoese herself, retraced that route a century later, with one small difference: today it is the great-grandchildren of those Ligurians who dream of an Italian passport, while she, in Buenos Aires, is looking for an Argentine work visa.
Her story begins in Genoa, where she worked as a personal trainer and played football for a local team, studying acting in the meantime (eleven years of it by now). At twenty, sitting on the sofa at home, she received an offer she didn't take seriously at first: Disney wanted her in the cast of O11CE, a youth series set in junior football and filmed in Buenos Aires. The audition was in Spanish, which she didn't speak; within a month, she says, she knew a good deal of it, and now she has a porteño accent.
A route between Genoa and the Río de la Plata that never really broke off: it just changed direction.
When filming ended she went back to Italy, but every couple of years she flew out to see her friends from the cast. At the start of 2026, at 28 and after a difficult period, she decided to leave for good, giving up a radio show as well, on the basis that if she didn't do it then she never would. Today in Buenos Aires she plays for a women's team, works as a model and tells her life between the two shores to more than fifty thousand followers on social media.
She calls Argentina her second home: she says the nightlife reminds her so much of Italy that sometimes she feels she never left, and that she loves the urge to get together for any reason at all, something she thinks Italy has partly lost. But she remains Genoese to the bone. She doesn't like mate, it's coffee and pasta every day, and when she talks a few words of lunfardo, the Buenos Aires slang, slip out, words that arrived from Genoa more than a hundred years ago.
The fairy tale, of course, has a less romantic side. An audiovisual project that would have allowed her to get a work visa has stalled, and on Argentine wages a European struggles to get by; if she doesn't find something stable, she may have to come back soon. It is the story of many Italians who leave today, no longer out of hunger but out of desire, and of a route between Genoa and the Río de la Plata that never really broke off: it just changed direction.