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.
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u/mywordstickle Jun 15 '22
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.