For over a century, we have chronicled Italian emigration, focusing primarily on the place from which it originated. Today, millions of Italian citizens live outside the country's borders, along with generations of descendants who continue to recognize Italy as a part of their history. With Toni Ricciardi, historian of migrations, professor at the University of Geneva and member of parliament elected in the Foreign constituency, we started from his latest book, A republic founded on emigration. Marcinelle: history and symbol, to reread Italian history through departures, returns, work, memory, and a question that increasingly concerns the present: what does it mean to be Italian in the world today?
When Toni Ricciardi He points out to me that just twenty-one days passed between the referendum of June 2, 1946, and the agreement with Belgium. It's precisely that number that sticks in my head.
On June 2nd, Italians, and for the first time in a national political election, Italian women, chose the Republic. Twenty-one days later, on June 23rd, Italy and Belgium signed a protocol providing for the dispatch of 50,000 Italian workers to Belgian mines in exchange for the supply of coal our country needed to restart a reconstruction that still needed to be completed.
Twenty-one days separate the moment Italy decides what kind of state it wants to be from the moment thousands of its citizens are called to leave to contribute, by working elsewhere, to the reconstruction of their homes.
«"The first thing the newborn Republic does is pick up exactly where the previous Italy left off: with emigration," Ricciardi tells me.
It is from this observation that his latest book takes shape, A republic founded on emigration. Marcinelle: history and symbol, and so does our conversation. Because Italian history changes perspective when emigration is brought back to the forefront and interpreted for what it was: a structural component of the country's economic and social construction and, at times, even a specific choice of international policy.
Postwar Italy was poor, wounded, with a productive system to rebuild and an international position to redefine. The departure of workers was part of a history that already had deep roots. Ricciardi recalls that, starting in 1868, spanning liberal Italy, Fascism, and then the Republic, approximately 150 protocols, treaties, conventions, and agreements related to the mobility of Italian workers were signed. From 1876, the first year of official emigration statistics, approximately 27 million Italians left over the course of a century, a figure comparable to the country's population following unification.
This centrality is also reflected in the Constitution. Article 35 recognizes the freedom of emigration and protects Italian labor abroad, a formulation that demonstrates how the phenomenon was perceived as an integral part of national life.
«Emigration was an unavoidable element on a social level, but it also represented a real geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy».
There's another point in Ricciardi's reasoning that particularly interests me, however, because it concerns the way a country constructs its own image of the future. Organizing large-scale migration flows required international agreements, of course, but something capable of entering the collective imagination was also needed.
«You had to generate a great narrative, a collective idea that would push people to emigrate.».
In postwar Italy, cinema played a huge role. American films initially depicted a society difficult to recognize for those living in a country where owning a bicycle could already be a small sign of prosperity. Then came Neorealism, and familiar places, faces, and social conditions appeared on the screen: the provinces, the lack of work, the rice weeders, the unemployed Neapolitans, the daily grind. Often, the possibility of leaving home also appears in these stories.
Then comes Marcinelle.
On August 8, 1956, 262 workers died in the Bois du Cazier mine. One hundred and thirty-six of them were Italian. The tragedy became one of the most painful symbols of Italian emigration and, in Ricciardi's interpretation, also a watershed moment in a country that would soon begin to tell its story in a completely different way.
The late 1950s marked the beginning of the economic miracle, but this miracle spread across Italy at varying speeds. The major cities and parts of the North experienced industrialization, rising wages, and renewed consumption, while in many provinces, modernization also benefited from the money sent by those working abroad.
Behind remittances lie stories we still know well in many Italian families: the house built in the village, a child's education paid for, their first appliance, a piece of land purchased, a small business launched. For thousands of families, the work done hundreds or thousands of kilometers away directly impacts their daily lives and future prospects.
When I ask him how much today's Italy owes to those emigrants, Ricciardi uses a word that I want to listen to again on the audio before its release, precisely because it carries a lot of weight: «"All"».
A few years later, the country's self-image also changed. Ricciardi chose a specific scene: Anita Ekberg inside the Trevi Fountain in Sweet Life. It's 1960 and that Italy now seems very far from the one of the post-war departures.
«"Italy stops portraying itself as a country of starving people and starts portraying itself as a country where life is beautiful.".
The economic boom, automobiles, fashion, design, and a newfound prosperity created an image that would remain with us for decades. As Italy became the world's most desirable country, the memory of emigration gradually faded into the background. Departures continued, while the way we narrate them changed.
And when, especially from the second half of the 1990s, Italians began to leave again in a consistent manner, we found a new expression capable of summarizing almost everything: brain drain.
Ricciardi just needs to hear it to react.
«Very ugly».
He says this with a smile, then gets to the point. For years, he explains, this formula has created a highly selective representation of the new emigration: the researcher, the doctor, the engineer, the professional who leaves Italy because his talent finds better opportunities abroad.
The reality, according to data Ricciardi has been studying for years, is much broader. Graduates and high school graduates, skilled workers, and people with varying levels of education, young and old, leave. And they leave for often overlapping reasons: salary, career, love, a better quality of life, a real opportunity that simply exists elsewhere.
Ricciardi emphasizes the self-exculpatory aspect of the formula. If those who leave always become excellent, then it's easy to argue that the problem concerns people so specialized that they need NASA, CERN, or major international centers. Much more awkward is the question of who finds better conditions elsewhere doing completely ordinary work.
«"Those who leave have brains and those who stay have brains too.".
Even when discussing those who choose to stay, Ricciardi avoids moral classifications. He's well acquainted with Vito Teti's work on "restanza" (remaining), and after nearly thirty years studying migration, he says he's given up trying to establish who has more power: those who leave and those who stay. These are different experiences, tied to different biographies, families, territories, and possibilities.
Instead, he identifies a very concrete continuity between the emigration of the 1960s and contemporary emigration: the value of work.
«"People leave because by moving a thousand, two thousand, five thousand, or ten thousand kilometers they can do the same job for double, triple, or quadruple the pay, with a completely different prospect of job growth.".
The true gap between yesterday and today, according to him, lies above all in the return journey. Twentieth-century emigrants often set out imagining a temporary stay, even when reality would later transform a few years into a lifetime. They saved, sent money home, built in their hometown, and continued to see return as a real possibility.
Today, those who leave are able to build their futures much more easily in their host country: they invest there, buy a home, raise children, consolidate a career, and build a new network of relationships. This change profoundly affects Italy, too, because it shifts the issue from simply bringing people back to the ability to maintain a relationship with them.
And it is here that the conversation arrives exactly at the point from which the editorial project of United States of Italy.
For years, we've told the story of every departure through loss: one less young person, one less skill, one less worker, a country that continues to empty. This is a real part of the problem, especially in an Italy experiencing an increasingly evident demographic crisis. Alongside that loss, however, lies an immense network of Italian citizens who live, work, and build relationships beyond national borders and who can continue to be part of the country's economic, cultural, and social history.
Today, approximately 6.4 million Italian citizens officially reside abroad. Around them are millions of descendants, natives, and second and third generations who maintain very diverse ties to Italy, often difficult to reduce to a single statistic.
I ask Ricciardi how much Italy really knows how to treat this presence as a global network.
His answer comes in three very simple words.
«"If you want to enhance a resource you have abroad, you have to listen to it, give it representation, and provide it with resources.".
Then he gives me an example that explains the concept better than many formulas on internationalization: Italian cuisine.
Today we celebrate the spread of pasta, tomatoes, Italian products, and our gastronomy as one of the great successes of Made in Italy. But that story begins long before promotional campaigns and marketing strategies.
It begins when an Italian opens a restaurant in New York, when a family imports products to Zurich, when a community continues to cook what it knows and slowly integrates those flavors into the customs of its host country. Before internationalization programs and economic diplomacy, millions of emigrants created markets, curiosity, and familiarity around Italian products.
Before the global Made in Italy, the Italians arrived.
And it is perhaps one of the passages that best explains how much the diaspora has contributed to Italy's global presence, including on an economic level. People who left to build their own future have simultaneously built, often without any intention of doing so, a part of the country's international image.
Being Italian, everywhere
When I ask him what it means to be Italian outside of Italy today, and how second- or third-generation Italianness can take on different forms, Ricciardi surprises me by immediately distancing himself from the word that seems inevitable in any conversation on this topic.
«I am a person who doesn't like the concept of identity».
He explains that identity becomes limiting when it is treated as a fixed heritage of values, traditions, and characteristics destined to remain the same over time.
«"We are Italian, but we are constantly evolving identities, contaminated by contamination, crossing, history, paths.".
Migrations, after all, tell precisely this story. In second generations, the desire to fully belong to the country in which they grew up often recurs, while in subsequent generations, curiosity returns about their origins: their grandfather's village, their surname, a photograph, a family history, a house seen only in stories.
In the United States, this dynamic is evident. There are Italian Americans who know very little Italian, people who have visited Italy only a few times, and others who are still searching for the country from which a great-grandparent left, yet that bond continues to occupy an important place in their personal history.
When I ask him how authentic an Italian experience lived almost entirely outside of Italy can be, Ricciardi goes even further: on an emotional level, he says, it can be even more intense. Distance often transforms a place into a memory, and memory can build a sense of belonging that spans generations.
That same sense of belonging, however, sooner or later encounters institutions. Italians abroad need consulates, services, citizenship, taxation, healthcare, investment tools, and the ability to participate in the country's political life. In 2006, there were just over three and a half million AIRE members; today, the community of Italian citizens residing abroad has nearly doubled and has a profoundly different composition.
Ricciardi is familiar with the issue from his parliamentary experience and highlights a contradiction: while Italy's presence around the world was growing, the reduction in the overall number of parliamentarians also reduced the representation of the Overseas constituency.
Here he cites a formula that comes from American political history:
«No taxation without representation».
For him, the issue goes far beyond the number of seats. A community maintains its connection with its country even when it manages to convey its needs to institutions. Otherwise, the risk is that Italianness abroad will remain confined to major symbolic occasions: Columbus Day, commemorations, Marcinelle, Italian festivals—important days that build memory, but which alone only tell a part of the relationship with the state.
When discussing migration, we inevitably come to Italy today, which has transformed from a country of great departures into a land of arrivals. Ricciardi emphasizes the selective way we preserve the memory of our emigrants.
In contemporary depictions, Italians who left often tend to appear as exemplary workers, well-organized, perfectly integrated, almost naturally welcomed by the societies they arrived in. History tells a much different story: exploitation, clandestinity, marginalization, discrimination, suspicion.
Ricciardi uses a much more effective expression than any sugarcoated reconstruction: our emigrants of the past, he recalls, were real people, not all "beautiful, clean and perfumed.".
It's a provocative phrase, but it brings memory back to its concrete dimension and strips Italian emigration of the celebratory patina we have often applied to it retrospectively.
«"But where am I from?"»
Towards the end of our conversation, I set aside statistics, representation, and immigration policies for a few minutes, because Toni Ricciardi has been studying emigration for almost thirty years, but even before that, he experienced it.
He is originally from Castelfranci, in Irpinia.
When we discover we're fellow countrymen—he's from Castelfranci, I'm from Atripalda—the tone inevitably changes. The geography we've been discussing throughout the interview suddenly narrows to just a few kilometers.
Ricciardi arrived in Switzerland when he was just eight months old and spent part of his childhood there. He then returned to Italy. Many years later, in 2011, Switzerland reentered his life through a postdoc at the University of Geneva. It was supposed to last two years, but instead became the beginning of another chapter in his personal and professional story.
Today he holds Italian and Swiss citizenship, and when I ask him where home is, his answer inevitably encompasses multiple places. He feels Italian, from Campania and Irpinia, and at the same time Swiss and European.
At a certain point he told me that, after having lived between Switzerland, Irpinia and Naples, he found himself asking himself:
«"But where am I from?"»
It's a seemingly simple yet profound question, especially after an hour spent talking about belonging, departures, returns, and generations raised across multiple countries.
Ricciardi found an answer that closely resembles his own idea of identity.
«"There are many things. And I claim them.".
Before we say goodbye, I ask him one last question. If the Republic born in 1946 can be reinterpreted through the role emigration played in its construction, what should global Italy of the 21st century be based on?
The answer comes immediately.
«On Italians, wherever they may be».
It is here that the conversation with Ricciardi returns exactly to the point from which we started, almost eighty years earlier, with those fifty thousand miners heading to Belgium.
For over a century, we have looked at emigration primarily from the place of departure, and we have vividly described what Italy lost when a ship left port, when a family split up, when a town emptied. On the other side of that journey, however, communities, businesses, families, relationships, languages, and new affiliations were born that continue to maintain a connection with the country of origin today.
Italians have left Italy, we have been saying this for generations.
The story seen from the other side of the journey adds something equally important: Wherever they went, they brought Italy with them.
And perhaps what we call today Global Italy It has been around long before we learned to name it.
