Italian Expat

Is leaving a choice or a need? Is a country that lets its children go a country that is open or without vision?

The phenomenon of young “expats” from Italy has been growing steadily for twenty years. It isn't just a question of “brain drain”, and they aren't economic migrants, who have always characterised Italian migration. They are aid workers, “cultural” migrants seeking different mindsets and networks of relationships from those they find in their homeland.

Ilaria Agostini has been in Argentina since 2002. The first impact with the destination country was by no means easy: “I arrived in Iguazu with a very heavy suitcase. When I got off the bus that took me from the airport to the park, a very long walk along a dirt track and knee-deep sticky red mud awaited me”. With time and commitment she found her way: she now lives in Bariloche, where she is a biologist and researcher. She met her husband, Esteban, in Argentina and her children, Matilda and Francesco, were born there.

Elisabetta Caloi has been in the United Kingdom since 2014 and now lives in Oxford, working as an editorial assistant and music teacher.

“When I was at primary school the teacher had us read Rodari's poem about emigrants “the emigrant's suitcase is not big, not heavy”. It came back into my life recently when a friend gave my son Renato “Filastrocche in cielo e in terra”. I flicked through it and immediately found that poem, and it almost brought me to tears... “But the heart no, I didn't bring it, into my suitcase it would not fit: far too painful was my leaving, beyond the sea it would not come. Faithful to the land that would not feed me like a dog, he stayed at home”.

Raffaella Marongiu left for Thailand in 2005. Now she lives in Chiang Mai where she owns a restaurant. “I have some Thai friends I am very fond of and I am sure they are fond of me too. But I always feel overshadowed by their Thai friends, as if there's always something missing in me. Right now I feel like a foreigner wherever I go. When I go to Sardinia, I tell myself: I'm going home. But when I leave there for Chiang Mai I tell myself: I'm going home. I feel like I don't belong to either place and that I live in limbo, foreign to both: it feels a bit surreal”.

Laura Ruggero, an aid worker who left for South America in 2014, returned to Italy in 2018 and now lives in Turin. “After four and a half years in South America, I was in Colombia. I decided to return for two reasons, one sentimental and one political. I missed my places, the Mediterranean at sunset. The political reason was the historical moment of fury directed against migrants, the rising racism, the criminalisation I read about in the newspapers. Working for migrants on the other side of the world, I felt compelled to return to defend the rights of migrants at home. I also wanted to prove that not all Italians are the same”.

Ikenna Offor, an Italian Nigerian who left for the United Kingdom in 2011, now lives in London and works as an Expansion Manager. “Britain sees cultural difference as an asset, even in simple capitalist terms, not necessarily in terms of solidarity. My company hires people from all over the world and this is one of its great strengths, which makes it competitive. There is no ambivalence and we do not feel engaged in a constant search for our identity, because here identity can simply be the sum of numerous life experiences”.