Chasing la dolce vita

When he was a child growing up in Emilia-Romagna, my great-grandfather Marco once found an eagle fledgling that had fallen from its nest. He kept it warm in the folds of his shirt and ran home, only to discover as he undressed that the bird had eaten strips of his flesh, its beak tinged red with blood. The rescued eagle thrived in my great-grandfather’s care, its wingspan soon a remarkable length. And all the while, Marco himself grew immensely tall. Then, one day, without warning, the eagle flew away. The moment my father told me this story when I was a boy, it lodged itself deep in my imagination. I pictured young Marco as a giant striding through the forests of north-central Italy, calling to the bird of prey, waiting in vain for it to land on his outstretched hand. Marco merged with the heroes of my illustrated classical civilisation books, earning his place between the busts of Roman emperors and the chapters on Greek mythology. What I never realised was that this family legend held clues to who I am and to my relationship to Italy. Lina Stores deli in Soho, London, has been a pillar of Italian life in England for decades. It’s where we’d sometimes meet our paternal grandparents when visiting London from our home in France. My brothers and I would line up in front of the refrigerated counter and ask for our favourite ravioli, doing our utmost to avoid any slip-ups in Italian that would make the staff wince: ‘ricotta e spinaci’, ‘zucca’, ‘funghi porcini’. Back at our grandparents’ flat, Nonna served the ravioli on an elaborately laid table, and my grandfather appeared with freshly grated Parmigiano. He’d sprinkle the cheese evenly over our pasta; never too much, nor too little. How he did this, and with such speed, we didn’t know. If we had spaghetti, Nonna would wrap her right hand around ours and twirl the fork with us so we held just the right amount, the bespattered tablecloth damning proof of our slapdash habits at home. My grandparents trusted that these rituals of the table (they saw them as basic codes of Italianness, connecting displaced Italians everywhere) would allow us to paper over the differences in our ethnically blended and peripatetic family. In this way, we’d be able to claim Italian identity for ourselves, despite its competition in our lives with Englishness and Frenchness. It would anchor us, or so they believed, and prevent us being bullied and singled out. Revving their Vespas and wearing clothes I’d have avoided, they couldn’t make head nor tail of me Every summer, on car journeys to Italy we’d listen and re-listen to Italian songs and fairytales to drum the language into us. Once we’d crossed the Alps, any stopover became an opportunity for my father to immerse us in further knowledge. He kept a torch in his pocket, and in the stillness of churches he’d let the beam scurry over frescoes until it hovered, halo-like, above a painted face or a feature in the background. ‘Such bellezza,’ he’d whisper, ‘look at the beauty of that.’ In explaining Masaccio’s brushstrokes, or playing Verdi and Puccini arias at car-shaking volume, we sensed my father was offering us, his sons, yardsticks by which to measure life. He needed us to see ourselves as the inheritors of a civilisation unlike any other. Italianness was his gift to us. In my teens, I spent a month in Florence looking after the child of a couple of scientists, colleagues of my father. My role was to speak to the boy in English; his parents’ job was to improve my Italian. The moment I was alone with the seven-year-old, he locked himself in his room and refused to come out. As a consolation, one evening, I was entrusted to a 16-year-old nephew who took me to join his friends in a packed central piazza. Within minutes, the assembled youngsters were trying to identify my hybrid accent, crowding round with questions, trying out their English: ‘Are you French or British?’ ‘Which football team do you support?’ ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ Revving their Vespas, blasting music I didn’t recognise, and wearing clothes I’d have avoided, they couldn’t make head nor tail of me. I escaped into Florence, only vaguely aware of where I was going. Leaning against a wall on the banks of the Arno, the Ponte Vecchio in the distance, I tried to convince myself that the surrounding ‘bellezza’ vaunted by my father was mine, that I fitted into the circus of Italian life I’d seen in Fellini films, but I felt I was a baffling anomaly, an impostor. The chameleon skills I’d always employed to fudge my way through existence had let me down. My hosts were in a state of panic on my return. Where had I been? I wasn’t going to be allowed out again. I’d failed as a childminder. And as an Italian. A cousin recently emailed me photographs of my great-grandfather Marco, the first to set the family’s migrations in motion. I was surprised to see that he was as tall as the family legend of the eagle would have it, towering over others, but also that he was standing in front of what was the Italian Hospital in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, the place he’d apparently helped to run. This was the very spot in London I’d sat on many occasions when, as a student at King’s College, I’d search for quiet garden squares in which to read and revise for exams. I’d always believed I was drawn to the Italian Hospital because of its name. But I remember how, more than once, I’d had to get up and leave, overwhelmed by an inexplicable sadness. In another photograph, Marco was posing with my great-grandmother Delfina, also from Emilia-Romagna, on a patch of grass in Hyde Park. I recognised it immediately as the hidden slope leading down to the Serpentine lake where I often go. After an online census revealed my great-grandparents’ old address on Highbury Fields, the sorrow I experienced outside the Italian Hospital returns. But this time its source is evident: we used to take our children to the playground by that house, parking right by my great-grandparents’ front door, our shouts and chatting rebounding off the windows. All these coincidences can doubtless be rationally explained, yet they leave me feeling that I live in the wake of tumultuous decisions made long before I was born, that I’m in a web of unseen connections, in friction with the mysteries of an uprooted Italian past. Dressed in British suits, all the more impeccable to hide his suffering, Marco would declare that he was finally home In 1940, when Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, all the ‘enemy aliens’ living in Britain had to be imprisoned, or as Winston Churchill put it: ‘Collar the lot!’ Marco, along with thousands of other Italians, and Germans, was rounded up and interned on the Isle of Man. As Rachel Pistol writes in ‘Enemy Aliens’ (2024), many Italian shops and businesses across the country were broken into and smashed by mobs. Marco was lucky not to be placed on the SS Arandora Star, a prisoner-of-war ship heading to Canada. More than 800 of these internees, including 442 Italians, died when the boat was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland. Just under a quarter were from different corners of Emilia-Romagna – some of them friends of Marco. The Italian Hospital scraped through the war and Marco returned to assist them. Researching this essay, I discovered that the building was broken into in 1947 and my great-grandmother, who was with her husband that day, died while confronting the intruders. On a visit to Emilia-Romagna some years ago, I met old people who recalled widowed Marco’s long stays every summer. Dressed in British suits, all the more impeccable to hide his suffering, he would declare that he was finally home. Then he would leave for London again, returning the summer following, then again setting off, over and over. Just like us, his descendants. Between the unification of Italy, in 1861, and 1985, around 29 million Italians left the peninsula. Political instability, high birth rates, natural disasters, unprofitable sharecropping (especially in the South), deprivation and overpopulation were major drivers for this exodus. And the more people left en masse, the more they encouraged others to join them. Today, about 80 million people outside Italy claim full or partial Italian ancestry. This diaspora has generated Little Italys across the world: in New York’s Manhattan, in La Boca, Buenos Aires, and in Clerkenwell, London. Once oases of solidarity, home-away-from-home citadels, where you could find anything – from the Italy football kit to keyrings with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – they now mostly feel like places of historic, even faded, hyper-Italianness. By 1920, São Paulo alone was home to 70 per cent of the Italians who emigrated to Brazil; as many as 60 per cent of Argentinians have a link to Italy, and Italian is still one of the main mother tongues spoken in Toronto, Canada. In Australia, 4.4 per cent of the population is of Italian heritage. In America, around 17 million people identify as Italian. Descendants of Italian migrants generally express an intense pride in their heritage, and many continue to live by its sociocultural tenets in spite of decades, or more, of absence. It is as if time away from Italy, and geographical distance, only amplify a yearning for it. Stanley Tucci, to cite but one well-known example (the same could probably be said of Lady Gaga or Francis Ford Coppola) begins his TV food series Searching for Italy (2021-22) by stating in his broad American accent: ‘I’m Italian on both sides.’ Every summer, as per my own family’s tradition, members of this diaspora return to Italy. They enjoy the peninsula in the heat-filled months: sea, mountains, food, art and music, and its dolce vita. Where Italians living in Italy might imbue their identity with more intrinsically regional elements, the diaspora, in its dissemination around the globe, carries with it a more all-encompassing interpretation of the country. Their version of Italy, like the one I grew up with, is capable of brushing over fractures and complications, and the darker sides of the nation, articulated as it is by ideals that extoll the peninsula as a connected whole. For bona-fide Italians, a tomato sauce is never just a sauce, but a form of alchemy By upholding and publicising the symbols of Italy – fashion, art, food, football – the diaspora has helped turn them into a recognisable shorthand for the country abroad. Visiting London’s Italian restaurants with my family, I’m struck by how many still have straw-clad Chianti bottles on the tables, and a packet of grissini tucked next to the plates, not to mention waiters who make a show of noisily grinding pepper onto our food. The performative nature of this overseas Italianness, its theatricality, is reinforced by walls decorated with photos of the owners posing with Italian American celebrities like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro or Sylvester Stallone. It is as if we’ve all been given roles, customers and waiters alike, in a Pirandello play that challenges distinctions between illusion and reality. My kids love YouTube and TikTok videos in which a nonna or nonno, from a well-ordered kitchen in Italy, reveals how to make the creamiest cacio e pepe or the tastiest tomato sauce. These elderly cooks appear to embody an authentic art to being Italian that cuts through the mimicry and stagecraft. The children laugh loudest when these elderly home chefs from Italy screw up their faces in disgust when asked to taste American shop-bought pizza or frozen lasagne. ‘Do you know what merda means in English?’ one asks. For bona-fide Italians, a tomato sauce is never just a sauce, but a form of alchemy. In an ideal world, it is seasoned with herbs once grown by the Romans, made with San Marzano tomatoes nourished by volcanic soil, and olive oil from Puglia’s ancient groves. This level of culinary precision largely explains why Italians are baffled, outraged even, by foreigners committing offences with their cuisine – snapping dry spaghetti in two before cooking it, grating parmesan onto seafood risotto, or mixing garlic and onion as a base for the same sauce. It might seem precious to outsiders, but a belief in excellence and the purity of traditions underpins Italianness. Indeed, something akin to the formula for tomato sauce can be applied to all areas of Italian production, from coffee machines and scooters to architecture. For my father and grandparents, Italian ingenuity stemmed from the peninsula’s endemic flair. A Lamborghini or a Gio Ponti chair was simply the latest layer of sediment in an accretion of refinement that had already given rise to Brunelleschi’s Dome and Scarlatti’s sonatas. Despite endorsing the country as the paragon of human advancement, my father routinely turned down job offers at Italian universities and research centres, choosing instead to work in France. The resulting tension, played out in frequently announced but endlessly postponed homecomings, threw us into ever more convoluted cycles of l’eterno ritorno that had already tormented my family for two generations with their toing and froing between the peninsula and Britain. Now, with a family of my own, and living and working in London, I’m aware of how I’m resuscitating the dilemmas my parents and grandparents faced. Increasingly, I’m hankering after Italy, wanting to pass on its rituals. I’ve made sure my children have Italian first names and a basic knowledge of Italy’s geography and history, and they seem to accept this as a given. I’ve fed them stories about eagles and ancestors, accounts of my childhood holidays in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, snippets of my time studying in Padua and Florence. I refer back to weddings and family gatherings we’ve all been to, seeding these memories in them, tincturing them with the aura of official history. I tell them about films they should watch one day, by Antonioni and Visconti, of the writings of Boccaccio and Dante. This visceral attachment to Italy is something I feel compelled to pass on. All the while, in parallel, I know I must value the family environment my wife and I have built in England – which is their home. It is an acknowledgement, too, of the sacrifices my ancestors made. At times, the trap snaps shut. I sense I’m merely living out the choices of the dead, unable to escape their restlessness. Visits to Italy only temporarily assuage the feelings of unsettledness, while leaving again stirs it up. I’m losing something I’ve never owned, just as I’ve been defined by a homeland I don’t inhabit, a past I cannot alter. Italian Americans were at times deemed ethnically ambiguous, their whiteness questioned Perhaps, like my diasporic peers who return every summer, I find it easier to fall back on wistful memories and fantasy. I revert all too conveniently, obsessively, to the house we stayed in every year during my youth. As if in a vision, I hold on to the hoopoes in the Tuscan grassland, their heads bobbing up and down in search of insects; my parents arriving with fresh focaccia from the village; the lizards darting across the stone walls; the steady strumming of the cicadas, and the sun tensing the vineyard wires until they buzzed and sang. Warm, moonlit evenings, too, with long tables under giant oaks, friends of our parents talking and singing Italian songs late into the night, knowing no one would tell us to go to bed. I want my children to experience all this, yet I know that I can’t recreate it. I’ve hunted for echoes of these idyllic days in Italian literature and art, and added them to the building blocks of my emigrant longing. Reading Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees (1957), I picture the specific branches and trunks I climbed in childhood. I smell and feel the remembered coolness of stone floors and shaded high-ceilinged rooms when immersed in Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). An Andrea Mantegna painting, like The Agony in the Garden (1455-56), sends me right back to horizons dotted with hilltop villages and fortified towers of crumbling stone. I’m conscious of the pull of Italy whenever I watch its films – and the irrational reverence this triggers. Recently, I found Alice Rohrwacher’s film La chimera (2023) almost too poignant to watch as it teemed with the details of Italian life. I know that, for every idealised image of the country, there’s a darker insinuation that Italians have had to face abroad. Late 19th-century and early 20th-century migrants from the peninsula frequently encountered discrimination – accompanied by a range of slurs, from ‘wop’ and ‘eyetie’ in Britain and the US, to ‘rital’ in France. Italian Americans were at times deemed ethnically ambiguous, their whiteness questioned, particularly when they were from the south of the peninsula. Hate-mongers, such as the Ku Klux Klan, alleged that the dregs of Italy were being sent abroad to cleanse the peninsula of its undesirables. In Protestant and English-speaking countries, Italian immigrants became easy targets because of their Catholicism, or their associations with anarchism and organised crime. Direct conflict regularly flared up. In 1891, in New Orleans in the US, 11 Italians were acquitted of the murder of the local police chief only to be seized by a mob of thousands and lynched. In France in 1893, locals turned on Italian immigrant workers in Aigues-Mortes, reportedly killing eight men, though the number is thought to be far higher. And in 1934, in Kalgoorlie, Australia, anti-Italian killings took place against a similar backdrop of resentment against foreigners allegedly taking jobs. Even assimilated Italians had their loyalty to their newly adopted lands questioned. It wasn’t just more recently arrived Italians like my great-grandfather who were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ during the Second World War. Some of the 4,000 men who were rounded up had spent most of their lives in Britain. This suspicion was mirrored, to a lesser degree, in Australia and the US – and this while half a million Italian Americans served in the US army during the Second World War, and 7,000 Anglo-Italians served in the British army. In today’s world of hardening borders and changing alliances, challenges lie ahead for diaspora Italians within Italy itself. Rules for claiming Italian citizenship through ancestry or ius sanguinis (‘right of blood’) have been tightened for descendants of emigrants. This route to citizenship is now granted only to people who have a parent or a grandparent with exclusive Italian nationality, or a parent who was a citizen for two years before their birth. A 160-year history of citizenship by descent has been undermined. The question, officially at least, of who is Italian or not will be thrown into further disarray. I know from experience how hard it will be to extricate Italy from the bodies, imaginations and feelings of these figli d’italiani, these sons and daughters dispersed and far away – people who often feel they have earned the right to call themselves Italian, or at least proudly Italo-something, not least because of the stigma and rejection they or their ancestors once encountered. At the heart of this circling around identity lies a thorny and painful question. Why do so many Italians continue to leave, and stay away? Between 2023 and 2024, 270,000 Italians emigrated, a figure considerably higher than in the previous two years. And behind the statistics lurks another grave concern: Italy’s population has been declining and is set to lose about 7 million people of working age by 2050. In 2025, there were only 355,000 births – the lowest number since the unification of Italy. In this context, the question of impossible returns is all the more troubling. I’d like to think that there exists a worldwide collective remembrance of all things Italian, even from the days before the Risorgimento, or the movement for unification. I want to believe the countless stories of regions, cities and villages, of injustices and glories, are being kept safe by millions of descendants of emigrants who have become fervent storytellers. They are the unsung chroniclers of the peninsula, the guardians of a rich repository of traditions and customs, precisely because they have had to work harder to preserve this heritage than natal Italians. In families everywhere, from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the US, Uruguay and Australia to France and the UK, traces of Italy remain in photographs, books and art, in buildings and the rituals of food. It is one of the paradoxes of diasporas that it is those who leave who want their country of origin to be fixed in time and preserved a certain way. My children and I have now visited most of the spots across London where my family lived and worked. Walking further from the former Italian Hospital in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, it doesn’t take us long to reach Clerkenwell’s once-vibrant Little Italy. Though many of the delis and ice-cream parlours have been changed by new waves of immigration and redevelopment, the plaque to Giuseppe Mazzini, a champion of Italian unification, on Laystall Street, reminds passersby of the area’s historic importance to Italianness. Mass is still celebrated in Italian at St Peter’s Church, and near the back of the church is a monument to the dead of the SS Arandora Star. We sit and read the list of surnames as they mingle with the priest’s prayers to form one long lament. I picture the churches of Emilia-Romagna, and the cemeteries where my ancestors are buried, and I see the roads that lead from there to London and back, worn down by constant travelling in both directions, a straddling between nations, where ghosts are as substantial as the living. My brothers have now exited the cycle of deferred returns by establishing families with Italian women who grew up in Italy itself. One of them has moved to Italy. In his family, Italian is, once again, the language spoken. We’ve all had to play catch-up with Italianness, but I have focused too much on the uncertainty this elicits in me. Instead, I should turn to the strength of the diasporic experience. There is power in duality, in multiplicity, and restlessness. And reassurance, too, in knowing that in London, my home, the invisible figure of my great-grandfather walks ahead of me, an eagle from Emilia-Romagna circling the sky above us.