How many of us were moved by that Italy that runs, jumps and throws everything and more and wins. And he wins a lot. Never like before in its history. At the end of the European Athletics Championships just concluded in Rome, Italy is first overall with 11 gold, 9 silver and 4 bronze. A total of 24 medals, which leaves all the other European nations well behind. To the people of saints, poets and navigators of Mussolini’s memory, about ninety years later we rediscovered ourselves, still in Rome, as a people of athletes.
That’s a good one. Who would have expected it. Yes of course, in the past we have had great athletes like Berruti, Mennea and Simeoni. But they were exceptions, rather than the norm. Today, however, there are many victorious athletes. And it’s not just Tamberi, Tortu or Palmisano. There are also Ali (Nigerian mother and Ghanaian father, but raised in Albate, a suburb of Como), Crippa (born in Addis Ababa, but Milanese by adoption), Battocletti (Moroccan mother and Italian father, born and raised in Cles, in Trentino), Iapichino (well-known daughter of the artist – Iapichino Italian father and Fiona May, Jamaican-English mother), Jacobs (everyone or almost everyone knows who she is), Simonelli (Italian father and Tanzanian mother, born in Africa but raised in Rome) and many others. They are the new face of the nation, of that Italy that runs, jumps and throws and wins everything or almost everything; celebrated by all of us, with the great leader of the nation, Mattarella, in the front row.
With the TV off
But try turning off the television or closing the pages of the newspaper. Forget about those faces you saw wrapped victorious in the tricolor. Instead, imagine meeting them on the street, on the bus or in a bar. How many of us would recognize them as Italians, as part of us – “us” understood here as white Italians? Because this is the true paradox of an Italy that we applaud in the stadiums, but which we often avoid, marginalize if not actually insult in our daily lives.
But in fact “they” are like “us” – they speak with the same accent as us, eat the same things we eat, dress the same way and laugh at the things we laugh at. But the face, that face doesn’t have our color and so we struggle to see them as part of “us”. More than Italians, we see them as those immigrants who have just landed on the boat in Lampedusa and thus we end up treating them in the same way. This is the great short circuit that characterizes the Italian nation today. A country that continues to think of itself as white and Christian (never mind the fact that almost no one goes to church anymore, except at Christmas and, perhaps, at Easter), while in fact it is a colorful country. And very colourful. The children of immigrants, the so-called second generation – even if they prefer to be called Italian-Marrochini, Italian-Ghanaians, etc. or even Afro-Italians – there are around 1 million. There are many, but in fact they are invisible, unless they score a goal for the national team (remember Balotelli?) or win a medal by running, jumping or throwing something.
Politicians and voters
Italy struggles to see itself colourful. If a gentleman who says that another winning athlete like Paola Egonu (born in Cittadella to Nigerian parents) has little to do with Italy, yet gets more than half a million votes in the European Championships, and another who says we must defend the “our white race”, and yet it finds itself governing the richest region in Italy, well then we have a problem. An integration problem. But we have the problem, not them. If you listen to the interviews of Ali, Crippa and Simonelli as well as those of all the other “second generation” boys and girls, you will see that the problem is not them not wanting to be like us. They have no doubt that they are and feel Italian. The problem is “us”, white Italians, who struggle to accept them as part of the nation. That an Italian can only be white (and Christian) is an assumption that all or many of us still maintain, despite the fact that, since 1973, Italy is no longer a country of emigration but of immigration. More than fifty years have passed, but today like yesterday we are still here, unable to understand and accept this demographic transformation of the Bel Paese.
It is not surprising, therefore, that among the thousands of young people who leave Italy every year (between 2011 and 2021, around half a million Italians between 18 and 34 years old moved abroad), the boys and girls of “second generation” are very numerous. Some of them, who live here in England, I interviewed recently for one of my research projects. The recurring theme is always the same: they leave Italy because they don’t see economic prospects, but also because Italy doesn’t recognize them as its own children. Rejected by their nation, some of them stop considering themselves Italian and rediscover their other identity, the one associated with their parents. An identity that many say is impossible to embrace in a country like Italy, saturated with whiteness. (I’ll add parentheses: even if Italians are not very white, just look at what a young Sicilian anthropologist, Alfredo Niceforo, wrote in 1901 about the “negroid race” of the people of the South, as opposed to the Aryan race of the Italians of the North. Distinction then migrated to the United States where at the beginning of the twentieth century Italian migrants were equated with African-Americans.
Rethink ourselves as a nation
The problem of integration is therefore that of an old Italy, which continues to think of itself as white (and Christian) and which struggles to come to terms with the new Italy, made up of the children of migration. The very fact that the law on citizenship reform, which provides for an easier path for the naturalization of the children of immigrants, has languished in Parliament for decades is a clear sign of this inability, both on the part of politics and on the part of society, to rethink ourselves as a nation.
It is therefore good to rejoice and exult in the victories of the “new Italians”, but if we want these victories to leave their mark, all of Italy must change pace, get on track and run towards a more inclusive future, open to change, and recognize itself for what it already is and will be more so in the future. A multiracial society, where the blue of our athletes, as Valerio and Vanni Spinella write in their book “The colors of blue. Ten stories of athletics without borders” (Ultra, 2024), is made up of many colours. It will be good to remember this when, once the race is over, we turn off the television or close the pages of the newspaper.
