Tell Me About Italy

I spent years travelling — mostly around Europe, but also through America, the Middle East and Africa. Talking with people from every corner of the world, I noticed something:

they admired the fact that I was Italian.

I would watch their eyes light up and wonder: what could I possibly have that’s so special?

“Tell me about Italy,” they would say.

But how do you explain Italy?

I didn’t want to disappoint those curious eyes. So I found myself looking inward, trying to understand for myself what makes me Italian. Not just one among many — but one of those people in whom Italy is immediately recognisable: in the way she speaks, the way she feels things, the way she moves through the world.

“You have such passion. You can tell you’re Italian,”

I heard many times. And so I asked myself: who put this passion inside me? Where does it come from?

Today I turn thirty-six, and I still haven’t found a single answer.

It might be the landscapes: mountains with their peaks, ochre hills, the deep or crystal-clear sea, volcanoes, sunsets. A country that even in its shape seems drawn with elegance — a high-heeled boot.

It might be the food. Twenty regions, each with its own products. And it’s not just a matter of recipes. Think of a carbonara: pasta, pecorino, guanciale. Simple ingredients, and yet extraordinary.

Or the fashion. The cinema. All things the world knows well, and that make Italy recognisable everywhere.

But there is something harder to explain. Something we perhaps never say out loud.

Our secret.

Being Italian is not just what we eat, how we dress, or where we go. It’s not the famous dolce far niente. It’s not simply “la bella vita.”

You understand Italianness by living among Italians: in the way they feel, the way they talk, the way they respond to life.

And there is something that runs through us from childhood, often without our even noticing.

Music.

Italian singer-songwriters have left inside us words and phrases that have become part of our memory. Lines that come back to mind in the good moments and the difficult ones, when we need to understand something about ourselves.

So I thought that perhaps this is how I could answer that question.

“Tell me about Italy.”

Through the words of its songs.

By drawing on Italian singer-songwriters and lyricists — from the greatest to the newest, from the past to today — and through those lines that have stayed in my heart.

I’m not a translator, but I will do my best to render their meaning in English as faithfully as I can, hoping that at least something comes through of what those words make me feel — an Italian woman who has been told many times: “You can tell you’re Italian.”

And maybe — who knows — I will have managed to truly tell you about Italy.