When I first started coming to Italy with some regularity in the 1990s, nearly everyone looked like me. Yes, you would see young men from Africa selling counterfeit purses laid out on blankets on the streets, and women dressed in traditional Romani dress with their children, often begging, but they were visible and notable exceptions to the norm.
Over the years, there has been an evolution to a more ethnically, racially and religiously diverse society, so that now, the diversity feels not much different from a typical American city. These are not just passers-by, but deeply entrenched communities, with clothing shops, food stores, restaurants and other institutions to serve their needs. The neighborhood where I’m currently living in Bologna, for example, in a slightly gritty part of town, has a very significant population apparently from the Middle East and North Africa.
Foreign-born people of 150 different nationalities make up about 12% of the population of 400,000 here, with the countries-of-origin most represented being Romania, Morocco, and Pakistan.
Like in the U.S., the original population is not all thrilled with this development. Georgia Meloni, the Prime Minister, was elected to power on a platform of zero tolerance of illegal immigration. so while it seems to me, as an outside observer, that everyone is happily coexisting, I imagine that the reality for these folks is not so easy.
Several years ago, my daughter Maria and I engaged a law firm to apply for Italian citizenship. I was unlikely to ever want to stay in Italy longer than the 90 days allowed by Schengen laws, but it is possible that Maria might someday want to move there, and even buy a home. I was going along for the ride, mainly to supply the $$$, and the closer link to the old country.
While it might seem that my father being born in Italy would be our obvious case, it turns out that because he had renounced his citizenship before I was born, that route does not work. So we were using a complicated quirk in Italian law that allowed us to apply through my maternal grandmother, who came to the U.S. at age 3.
So for the past three or four years, our lawyers have been working to collect all sorts of original documents required by Italian law. Amazingly, in a matter of days, they were able to get my grandmother’s 1880 birth certificate from a remote hilltop village in Basilicata. However, despite many attempts over several years, they have been unable to get my grandparents’ marriage certificate from the Cook County records bureau in Chicago.
But wait a minute. On March 28, Italy enacted an emergency measure that restricted citizenship to be granted only to those whose Italian connection goes back either one or two generations. The purpose was to relieve their courts and consulates and municipal offices overwhelmed by citizenship requests from people with links to Italy in the distant reaches of their family trees, perhaps simply for the convenience of having an EU passport. These petitions have increased by 40% over the past decade, including 30,000 new Italian citizens from Argentina (including their President, Javier Melei) and 20,000 from Brazil in 2024 alone. As I understand it, a goal would also be to make citizenship more attainable for the children of immigrants who actually live and work here and are full members of society, and less attainable for people like us. Under these new rules, Maria wouldn’t qualify, and unfortunately, thanks to Cook County, we didn’t make it in under the wire.
Immigration lawyers and others are challenging this ruling, which requires a period of public comment before becoming law. But truth be told, it seems fairer to me to privilege those who have lived and worked here and made a contribution, than to advantage those like me with the “right” blood.
Gigi's Italia 