The diaspora that doesn't know it is one

There is a question that anyone who has lived a few years outside Italy has been asked at least once, usually over dinner, usually by someone whose surname is Rossi or Ferraro but who struggles to speak Italian: "So where exactly are you from?" And when you answer, Bari, Treviso, Cosenza, they look at you with something between nostalgia and curiosity, because their great-grandfather came from there too, or from a village nearby that they know only by name, sometimes mangled.

That scene has always made me think that Italians are a diaspora that doesn't know it is one.

With the Armenians the matter has been clear for a century: the Republic of Armenia has fewer than three million inhabitants, the diaspora is several times that, and over all this time it has built schools, churches, newspapers and above all a political voice, which for decades knocked on the doors of parliaments around the world to have the 1915 genocide recognised, and in many cases succeeded. The Jewish diaspora needs no comment. As for the Irish, it is enough to recall that St Patrick's Day is felt more deeply in New York than in Dublin, and that anyone with a grandparent born in Ireland can still apply for an Irish passport.

We, on the other hand, who are no small number either, have always treated emigration as a page to be turned quickly. Italy takes little and poor care of you while you are on its soil; once you leave, you are no longer its problem. It is like the father who has to find a place for a relative: he settles him somewhere, and when the relative leaves he considers the matter closed, hastily, and never thinks about it again. For other peoples this does not happen, almost always because their emigration was traumatic, born of deep political and social tensions. Italian emigration was almost always economic, and it never had a road back.

Beyond the borders there is an Italy probably larger than the one inside.

About sixty million people live in Italy, and more than six million are registered with AIRE, the registry of Italians resident abroad; but the real count begins afterwards, when you add the roughly sixteen million Americans who declare Italian ancestry, the Argentines (more than half, by some estimates, have at least one Italian ancestor), the Brazilians, who number in the tens of millions, and then Uruguayans, Canadians, Australians, Belgians, Germans, Swiss. The figures are approximate and everyone calculates them as they please, but the substance holds: beyond the borders there is an Italy probably larger than the one inside, and no one, neither governments nor newspapers nor universities, has ever bothered to look at it as a whole.

I believe it comes down to the story we have told ourselves. The emigrant, in the Italian imagination, is still the man with the cardboard suitcase from black-and-white television: someone who left because he had no choice, best passed over in silence. Whoever leaves first becomes "the one who lives abroad", then the oriundo, and in the end a foreigner with a surname ending in a vowel. Italian Americans founded important associations, Italian Argentines built hospitals and mutual aid societies that have stood for more than a century, but each in their own backyard, without talking to one another and barely talking to Rome.

The state, for its part, has not helped. We invented the overseas vote, and fine, but since 2022 these millions of people have been represented by eight deputies and four senators. In 2025 citizenship by descent was restricted, for reasons that are partly understandable (clogged consulates, endless paperwork, some abuse), but the message that reached Buenos Aires and São Paulo was a single one: deep down, we can do without you. A country that wanted to count for something in the world would do exactly the opposite.

The beauty, or the paradox, is that the network already exists, it just doesn't know it. The engineer in Stockholm, the restaurateur in Melbourne, the Italian-Argentine lawyer and the Calabrian-descended manager working in Manhattan recognise each other instantly, perhaps from the way they gesture or the way they complain about the coffee, and they have more in common than they imagine: a certain distrust of power, the cult of the long lunch, the art of getting by that abroad, curiously, becomes a virtue.

Italiade was born partly from this, from the idea that it would be enough to notice. Not to mourn those who left, we have enough regrets already, but to tell the story of those who remained Italian elsewhere, often without knowing it, and to give this scattered Italy a place where it can read about itself. And if one day Rome too decided to look in the mirror and see itself for what it is, a nation with half its family abroad, so much the better. We, meanwhile, are making a start.