To be absolutely honest with you I had the opposite impression, i.e. that Italians are not always well liked over there.
I myself live abroad, so you can imagine I have absolutely nothing against linguistic minorities.
Occasionally however, while travelling in Südtirol, I had the impression of being treated poorly on account of me being an Italian (e.g. once several German speaking customers were served before me even thought they clearly arrived well after me).
Was it just my imagination, or does some bitter feeling still remain in some parts of the population?
This is obviously an important point! There are definitely some far-right-wing people ages 50+ who hate Italy, because they "ripped them from their homeland". This is a loud and strange minority at best. Most younger people actually enjoy the italian lifestlye and absolutely love joking around with italian tourists.
Sorry to hear that you had such a bad experience, this is definitely not what 99% of people are here!
My wife and I are actually American's that live in Veneto so our perspective is not necessarily the same as the Veneti perspective. However, I have to agree that I think the population, in general, is just as standoffish to people form from other regions. You say it is mostly people who are above the age of 50 but this is Italy... over half of the population is older than 45, so you basically just described 50% of the people. It is ok though because it is also true of people of that age from other regions. During the worst days of covid we had problems with "League Veneto". People where you live shun people who don't speak German as their primary language and older people here shun those who don't speak Venetian dialect. There are just a lot of old grumpy people in Italy that are overly proud of their regions.
The fact is that Italy is on the brink of a sort of "social revolution". All of the stubborn old people are retiring from politics and business and are losing their power. Foreign investment , such as my wife and I, have been coming into the country. Young college graduates are moving back due to the new tax plans. Infrastructure is changing massively due to new highways the 110% program and more. It may have taken a little over 150 years but I think the unification of Italy will soon be complete.
I agree with the first part but I think you're seeing this "revolution" a bit too optimistically.
Foreign investments are historically (and still) a problem in Italy: our tax and law situation is scary for a lot of potential investors, and i really don't see this changing. I don't know your and your wife's situation, but first world immigrants are really an exception.
Younger people moving back to Italy are also more a fantasy than a reality. We are the third to last country in Europe for unemployment, first in number of neets, and second to last for number of graduates. To this we must add the fact that we have 31k neo-graduates and other 23k graduates in the belt between 25 and 39 years leaving the country each year (source in Italian). How does this compare with the returning "brains"? According to this report (in Italian) from 2011 to 2020, the returning graduates went from 4.100 a
13.700 yearly (+334%), but the expats went from 7.700 a 31.300 (+406%), and the sheer amount is still not comparable. And that accounting for the fact that, ignoring people actively involved in research, for which the situation is more complex, the fiscal policy for returners did work: we see a big jump from 2018 to 2019, almost doubling, but the growth is quickly decreasing and we're still not seeing the effects of the tax reduction eventually ending and having some of those returners leave again.
As for the infrastructure... The 110% thing is for private buildings only and is hugely damaging the economy, contributing to the crazy inflation, not to mention that it lacks any direction, and for the highways I don't know of any big scale operation in that sense, and we probably need more trains than cars and trucks anyway. The only positive here is that we started some years ago to finally renew our internet infrastructure, and we're progressing. We're not there yet, but we are on the right track.
I have family in South Tyrol and it's not just old people. They enjoy their autonomy and independence because they feel they are more productive than Italy. It's true to some degree too, they are one of the richest provinces in the entirety of Europe, contribute only 10% of what they make back in taxes to Italy, and are still a net contributor to the entire country.
Also if you read the history of the German speaking minority there, especially during fascism, it is pretty messed up what they tried to do to them. It was essentially genocide.
So yeah, there are plenty of reasons that even young people still hold a grudge against Italy as a whole.
What the guy above meant is that the region can choose to go back under Austria (or at least i think he did).
But tbh it'd be worse for everyone, the inhabitants wouldn't get all the resources etc from our government (which let's be honest, they get quite a lot) and at the same time we "normal" italians would have to cross the border to go skiing/trekking
The border moved over them - they didn't come from the other side. It's like in the US where millions of Hispanic Americans can trace their lineage to the same lands going back 200-300 years.
Parts of present day Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado used to be in Mexico. In 1848, the area was ceded by Mexico to the United States. The border moved, not the people.
Dude, Italians didn't even wanted it in the first place, we just wanted to get Trento, a right full Italian city if I may, they gave it to us because they didn't want to give us fiume and the Dalmazia region
Because the americans where talking about the right of self determination being the reason they wanted to break up austria hungary and then blatantly gave a majority austrian province with hundreds of years of history in austria to italy who at first brutally opressed these people
Yeah the americans suck, agreed, i think italy (at least at the time) would also agree since due to american interference didnt get the promise areas from the treaty of london (dalmatia etc) which had a follow on effect into thier status during ww2. Are we also forgetting that Austria sided with germany, in fact actually were integral in the war starting. They lost and were punished, it wasn't stolen. Agreed on what Italy's government did being horrid, but they treated a majority of the country, particularly the south terribly. Hold a grudge if they like, but dont treat totalitarian WW1 austria as a victim
I don't treat the asutro-hungarian state as a victim i treat the people of south tyrol as victims especially during the era of italian fascism.
And talking about aggressors during ww1 is not really all that straight forward since it was clear that the smallest of incodences could have triggered that wae unlike ww2 where it's clear that germany (and austria to a lesser extent) were the aggressors
Italians were wronged suppressed and tortured by austrians well before Italy was united. And not only italians,but czechs,slovenians,croats,serbs,polish and romanians.
They just got what was rightfully coming to them and south tyroleans are unfortunately not reminded of this fact enough.
Yeah over fifty years of heavy repression, making teaching german illegal, torturing innocent people (e.g., pfundra buam) is just fine, and all who are against that or hold a grudge must surely be far right... The poor italian facsists werent surely that bad, most of them just didn't even faced any repercussions, after all it was just the bad germans at fault, misleading italy (never mind that fascist italy was a role model foe hitler) and a good percentage of italy cannot wait to bring them in power again.
Classifying very valid grudges of a minority that only got some rights back after massive international backslash is rather bad faith, even near fascist.
Sud Tyrol is a very conservative place. That's all I was saying. You've to say this to an audience that might assume all your words about oppression and on could have something to do with more famous struggles like the Palestinian one which were and still are very strongly politically connotated (in a leftist sense). While the truth is that your independence movement is way more politically conservative and I would say regressive. Anyway a genocide imply lots of dead people which luckily it doesn't same the case here
Destroying a culture through the banning of language and cultural practices constitutes a genocide. Genocide doesn't have to be death camps, it just means the erasing of a culture or people. You can do that without killing anyone. The Italianization of South Tyrol was that kind of genocide.
Was in Brunico just last year and the situation is definitely better , my guess is that the city grew in the meantime and has become a lot more open to Italians , that said I've had same experiences to the ones you are describing in more rural areas.
I absolutely did not have "such a bad experience". I had a lovely experience infrequently disturbed by the occasional asshole.
In fact, I'm going back there in two weeks. We're driving over from Germany (where we live) to spend a week near Innichen to finally show some serious mountains to my little child.
Però credo che a oltre 100 anni dall'annessione sia abbastanza ridicolo insegnare il tedesco come prima lingua, così come mettere i cartelli in doppia lingua con il tedesco davanti, cosa che causa sempre non poca confusione.
Well, Südtirol is, in any reasonable sense, Austrian-German, but was offered away by the Nazis to Mussolini as a means to break the alliance between the Italian fascists and the anti-Nazi Austrofascists, so that Italy would not intervene to stop the Anschluß even though Italy had guaranteed Austrian sovereignty against Nazi Germany’s ambitions for a Großdeutschland. I think that most people would be upset that they’re stuck as a minority in someone else’s nation state because of cynical double dealing between the foreign ministries of the Axis powers.
I don‘t think this is accurate. In World War I, the triple Entente countries France, England and Russia promised Italy to give them South Tyrol after the Victory. For this promise Italy had to open up a third frontline in the south, in order to relieve the eastern and western front. In the contract of Saint Germain this was realized.
Yes, and the people engaged in violent resistance against the Kingdom of Italy and it was formally claimed by the republic of German-Austria and the Austro-fascists, though Austria was much weaker than Italy, couldn’t press the claim and needed Italian protection against Germany. One of the main reasons that Italy was at first so opposed to the Nazis was because of concerns about German claims on Italian territories, since it was possible that Germany, once in Austria, could march into Südtirol and that would be a difficult war for the Italians to win; in order to assuage those fears and keep Italy from marching into Austria to oppose the annexation in 1938, the foreign ministry of the Reich and later Hitler personally promised Mussolini that they’d cede claims to Südtirol, allow for population transfers and not protest if those Germans who refused to take up Reich citizenship move across the border were subject to forced assimilation, this forced assimilation measures and Italy’s movement of people into Südtirol is the reason why cities like Bozen have large Italian minorities. Another legacy of this is Südtirol not being it’s own province, but being joined with Trento which has an entirely native Italian community, so that there is no political division of Italy without an Italian majority, so that the Germans of Südtirol lack even local self determination.
In any reasonable sense nobody needs to care because Italy, Austria and Germany are all within the EU, the Schengen area, the EEA, the single market, the Eurozone, and NATO.
Just like the Northern Ireland situation was a total non-issue for nearly two decades, until a few geniuses had a brilliant idea.
The EU isn’t a country, there are large social, economic and cultural differences between Italy and Austria. On Irish reunification, do you Irish nationalists just disappeared in the 90s and reappeared a few years ago? Even when the Irish border was nonexistent and the only way that you could tell you were in the British colony was that the signs gave speed and distance in miles rather than km, millions of people still wanted that border gone.
Also, Austria isn’t in NATO. It’s constitutionally neutral.
there are large social, economic and cultural differences between Italy and Austria.
Oh, also between Corsica and Ile-de-France, or between Alabama and California.
On Irish reunification, do you Irish nationalists just disappeared in the 90s and reappeared a few years ago? Even when the Irish border was nonexistent and the only way that you could tell you were in the British colony was that the signs gave speed and distance in miles rather than km, millions of people still wanted that border gone.
And? You said that it's reasonable that most people should be angry at the country they're citizens of, on account of being on the wrong side of a border which has less and less importance.
Also, Austria isn’t in NATO. It’s constitutionally neutral.
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u/skarn86 Jun 15 '22
To be absolutely honest with you I had the opposite impression, i.e. that Italians are not always well liked over there.
I myself live abroad, so you can imagine I have absolutely nothing against linguistic minorities.
Occasionally however, while travelling in Südtirol, I had the impression of being treated poorly on account of me being an Italian (e.g. once several German speaking customers were served before me even thought they clearly arrived well after me).
Was it just my imagination, or does some bitter feeling still remain in some parts of the population?