who gets to be italian?

ma che cazzo? citizenship, xenophobia, and possibility

Last month, the Italian government announced that it would cut off millions of people in the diaspora by limiting dual citizenship to those with Italian parents or grandparents. By eliminating Italian great-grandparents from the eligibility requirements, the country dramatically shrunk the pool of would-be citizens. I am one of them, and will now watch my 74-year-old father begin the application process alone. He is my last remaining link to the country via jus sanguinis, or “blood right” citizenship. It all got me thinking about why and how Italian-Americans seek out Italian citizenship in 2025, what pulls us to the country, and why.

I’ll use the example of my dad to start. The idea of dual citizenship has always been a bit of a novelty to him. He muses about the allure of buying an old property in Tuscany, renovating it, and splitting his time between the new house and the United States. In both scenarios, he lives semi-rurally, where he can birdwatch and photograph nature in peace. He doesn’t really care to interact with many local people, and doesn’t take much of an interest in the region’s politics or issues beyond those that immediately concern him.

Italian and American passports. Photo via ThisIsItaly.

In my (perhaps overly critical) view, his proposition feels like it would benefit from several reality checks. Tuscany is a relatively expensive part of the country, and not, generally, where the famous 1-Euro houses are offered. My dad has no roots in Tuscany: of his three Italian grandparents, two are from the South (Campania and Puglia) and one from the far north (Piedmont). He has sort of visited these other regions, but he prefers Tuscany for its rolling hills and good wine. He’s daunted by the prospect of learning Italian—the thought of signing up for newly mandatory proficiency tests is enough to shake him from ever completing his application. Overall, his ideal Italy matches his ideal America: a place where he can live in quiet, undisturbed comfort.

Even then, when pressed for details on his plan, what begins as a semi-viable option for retirement devolves into childhood memories of his grandparents, the handful of Italian phrases he picked up from his family members, the cousins he knows a few towns over who also took small steps into dual citizenship research, jokes about talking with his hands, and lines from The Godfather. His behavior encapsulates a lot of what it looks like to be Italian-American in 2025, at least from where I sit. It’s a soup of miscellaneous ingredients, including nostalgia, ill-defined longing, readily-available stereotypes, and memories from vacations to Florence and Rome. Notably absent is any meaningful cultural or spiritual connection to the land.

I’m interested in many aspects of the Italian diasporic experience: the transformation of an otherized group into White People, the snatches of folk culture that only emerge via kitchen whispers, and the way we conceive of ourselves as a demographic in contemporary America, one that was historically heavily oppressed and, in more modern times, does the oppressing. American conceptions of whiteness and class status remain tangled up when it comes to Italians, no more markedly so than within actual Italian families.

All of these issues don’t necessarily steer the questioner in any specific direction, but as the US empire begins its slow death spiral and its inhabitants start to leave en masse, dual citizenship with another country looks increasingly appealing to many—and Italian-Americans are no exception. In fact, Italy formerly offered one of the most liberal jus sanguinis paths to citizenship: all you needed was a great-grandparent (terms and conditions may apply) and money to fork over to a legal team if your ancestor was a woman.

But for all my own interest in Italy, Italian-American culture, and my desire to secure a place in the world should I lose the ability to live in safety here, I am wary of romanticizing any country—especially one that made life unbearable for my ancestors, and especially from my own position of relative privilege.

Access to citizenship is already a struggle within Italy. Children of migrants born in the country are only eligible to apply for citizenship once they turn 18. Valentino Larcinese, a professor in public policy at the London School of Economics (LSE), told Al Jazeera that “there are ‘one-to-two million non-naturalized immigrants in Italy under the age [of] 18’” which is “‘far greater than the tens of thousands seeking passports outside of the country,’” incidentally.

Furthermore, Italy’s right-wing government regularly infringes upon the rights of the poor, working-class, migrants, queer people, and people of color—all of whom may struggle to access elusive citizenship amid circumstances far more desperate than mine. Italian racism is well-documented, particularly against Black immigrants, who face tremendous discrimination and increased violence from right-wing Italian nationalists. And widespread apathy among white Italians only worsens the problem. “‘[Italians] don't want to admit that there is racism in Italy. They always say America or the UK is worse,’” says Italian-Eritrean filmmaker and podcaster Ariam Tekle.

Senegalese community members in Italy call for a demonstration on August 3, 2018, after Cisse Elhadji Diebel was shot. Ylenia Gostoli for Al Jazeera.

Human Rights Watch’s 2024 report noted that “Italy dropped from 34th to 36th place out of 49 European countries in ILGA Europe’s assessment of policies and laws protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people…[as evidenced through] hate speech by prominent politicians, attacks on same-sex parent families, and inadequate state response to violence and discrimination targeting LGBT people.”

And in September 2023, Georgia Meloni’s government dismantled the country’s minimum income system in order to promote higher employment rates—a plan critics say “treats poverty as an individual fault and does nothing to [address] how wealth is distributed in the country.”

The alignment of capitalist, racist, homophobic, and nationalist forces have surged due to the success of hard-right parties like the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), creating a dangerous environment for huge swaths of the Italian population. Seeking citizenship as an American is then a comparatively trivial side quest that bypasses the struggles faced by so many disenfranchised groups within Italy.

Yet I’m still drawn to the country, for reasons both practical and ephemeral. I could list every positive aspect of life there, but any reader probably knows them, at least in theory: a strong healthcare system, a slower pace of life that seems to stubbornly challenge the vortex of contemporary capitalism, natural beauty, tremendous amounts of art, and the chance for reconnection with some of my cultural roots, whatever that means. So how do I reconcile Italy’s poisonous social ills with my own knotted attraction to the country? How do I make sense of my own positionality on the issue?

I think the answer lies beyond whoever center-right Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Tajani deems worthy of attaining citizenship. In my view, the government of a country with a declining population that actively harms and shuts out would-be citizens is not in a position to qualify anyone’s Italian-ness, much less anyone’s right to live in safety. The Italian government’s literal gatekeeping deserves to be rejected outright as an ambiguous and silly boundary at best (in my case) and a dreadful espousal of violence at worst (in the case of so many nonwhite and/or queer Italians).

In 2016 I read an interview with former mayor of Palermo Leoluca Orlando, widely credited with fighting the Sicilian Mafia in the 1980s and more recently for promoting integration and inclusion of migrants in Sicily. He told Zone Books’ Near Futures: “‘The city of Palermo is not a European city. It is a Middle Eastern city in Europe’ that shares as much in common with Beirut and Djibouti as with Rome or Hamburg.” This conception of Sicily as not the southernmost border of an encroached-upon white country, but of a land that is culturally distinct from Europe, is the backbone for Orlando’s proposals to make Sicily a leader in welcoming and uplifting immigrants.

Leoluca Orlando in his Near Futures interview.

Historically, Southern Italians and Sicilians are the peoples most forced into migration themselves, in search of work and higher education in Northern Italy, leading to significant brain drain across the region. While wealthier Northern cities see themselves as staunchly Italian and European, these identities are grappled with throughout the South, in part owing to the region’s centrality in the long legacy of Mediterranean trading and conquest.

Orlando’s words are echoed in the sentiments of Eduardo Castaldo, an artist and photojournalist who recently told Makaani: “The city where I live, Napoli—we are the West but we are also Mediterraneans. In a way, we are much [closer] to Palestine than to Milan. For a thousand years it was easier to reach Alexandria in Egypt than Vienna or Paris. Our culture is built on relationships throughout the Mediterranean.”

Solidarity protest for Palestine on December 9, 2023 in Naples. Savin Massimo Mattozzi for Hyphen.

That these visions of hope should come from Southern Italians and Sicilians—demographically the poorest, most marginalized members of the country, like my two great-grandparents who left for America—advocating for a borderless future is no coincidence. It is in this conception of Italy that I invest my hopes, both personal and political: a place that indeed makes a return to its past, not through whitewashed history and vain, pigheaded nationalism, but in a revival of shared connections and cultures, which could lead to a multicultural, inclusive society that reflects a forward-thinking hub in the Mediterranean. La dolce vita, indeed.