Stanley Tucci’s culinary tour of Italy on the National Geographic channel may depress you even if you’re impressed by his regional revelations.
I’ll not get into his odd focus on the various ways Italians consume animal offal, but it’s the ethnic diversity he showcases that has me reflect on what it means to be Italian. Back in 2020 I wrote about Italy’s changing ethnic and racial dynamic. It has been increasing exponentially since then. Much of Europe has been subject to huge inflows of African, Asian, and Islamic migrants. My colleague Bill Dal Cerro notes that the majority of French national soccer team is African. Of course, I’m expected to say that this is a positive thing, but I’ll leave it at that.
Tucci’s visit to Lombardy found him in the stables of Grana Padano’s milk-producing bovines. He reported that there are 30,000 Sikhs in the region, most doing the farming and husbandry Italian youth avoids. Sikhs make up some of 223,000 Hindus who live in Italy. In 2017, Italy’s high court had to ban Sikh men from carrying sacred daggers in public—good news for the cows! In Lazio, Tucci found out that there are 25,000 Egyptian pizza-makers in Rome alone. They are a faction of the nearly 3 million Muslims, 5% of Italy’s population, that call la patria home.
Tucci’s visit to the Alpine region of Trento-Alto Adige was more like a sojourn to Austria—goulash and wurst. Half the population is ethnically and culturally Germanic, a region awarded to victorious Italy after the First World War. Mussolini had cut a deal with Hitler to resettle the German-speaking inhabitants back to Austria, and some 75,000 took the offer. Full Italianization was in the works until Mussolini’s ouster in 1943. Today, the region is bi-cultural and autonomous. Most Germanics see their Italian citizenship as a suggestion.
Ethnically, Italy’s largest minority is Romanian with one million people. Romanians are distant cousins of ours with their own criminal element. Their language is Italic and some of their DNA traces back to Roman legionaries who conquered and colonized that Balkan area. Then there are Albanians (416,000) who have been part of the Italian fabric for centuries, having migrated to the southern regions over the millennium. The surname Albanese is one of many clues that point to Albanian DNA in many of us. These ethnics are of the Euro-Caucasian variety, easily blending with our ancestral mix. Not so easy is the Chinese population, mostly centered in the northern regions where they monopolize clothing manufacture. There are an estimated 309,000 Chinese who rarely mix with the general population. Chinese workshops often skirt fire laws, and organized crime festers in their closed society.
Historically, Italy has absorbed countless foreign cultures but managed to remain 99% Catholic and culturally Italic. That is already in flux. Today, only 85% of Italians identify as Catholic. You can find a mosque in any major city as well as finding unique ethnic neighborhoods. The Italian government has made citizenship harder to obtain, but not insuperable for the millions of newcomers. Meanwhile, those of us with blood ties to Italy have recently had more restrictions placed on dual citizenship. In the end, Italy’s declining birthrate necessitates Third World immigration.
In the case of farmworkers like the Sikhs in Lombardy, how long can Italy count on them remaining farmworkers? Immigrant parents prize education and social advancement. In a generation, milking cows and shoveling manure will require new immigrants to replace the Sikhs. Controlling immigration to achieve a beneficial mix is challenging for any country.
Other European countries like Poland and Hungary are resisting immigration for fear of what is happening in Sweden, England, and France. There, increased crime rates and racial strife are daily occurrences. Sweden has become a battleground for violent Islamic gangs. In England, Pakistani men free of Islamic taboos have declared open season on young English women, and France is constantly dealing with Islamic terrorists and ghetto upheavals.
For those of us who relate to Italy through its magnificent history and through our forefathers, we must accept that Italy is slowly succumbing to multi-culturalism. That may seem attractive to some paesani, but not to all of us. -JLM
Birthrates indeed. They are low all over the West…But not in Muslim countries….
I am fully resolved that our world, the one that was blessed with real family Italian values in which I grew, will change dramatically over the years, owing to the multi-culturism that is taking place in Italy. And yes, it will NOT be the land of my grandparents, at all. each generation wants to pass on something to the next in the decades that follow. I feel we need to be concerned for what owe are passing on in Italy. World movement has been the cause and a blessing at times, but for us all, nonetheless, a concern!
Its hard to fathom, but no one has a crystal ball to predict the future….I often wonder if Western Europe (Including the newly unified Italy) had not started on the colonial race, and then brought their colonials into their “mother country” would we be better off?
The mass migration of immigrants to Europe, started around the time of World War I, where many of the colonials were thrown into the literal slaughter. They were likewise brought over into labor battalion where many were exposed to Western thought and more importantly liberation movements. Every large European city had its ethnic enclaves.
And for many of the poor in Europe, they were conscripted into the armies to support colonialism….and ironically one of the reasons many Italians migrated to the USA, was because the contadini either had to be drafted into the Italian army and fight in Libya and Italian East Africa, or “get out of Dodge”. Let’s hope Western cultural values survive and able to assimilate this new wave of migration. Ironically too, the British who trace their Roman ancestry to the Empire really included, Roman Legionnaires from Romania…..The Romans were adept at using their legions to assimilate, colonize and defuse rebellion by transferring large groups of fighting men from one part of the empire to another.
It is not attractive to me and the Ialian government if it wants to be viable to the natives, needs to find ways of 1( controlling immigration and 2) offering incentives for new births to increase the population, i.e. governemnt incentives, tax rebates, etc.
Italy needs to be its own person and be independent and stop following the crowd, i,e, the EU, NATO, etc. be your own voice!!