Forget the Mafia, David: This Time You’ll Need Meatballs
The creator of The Sopranos wants to tell the story of Americans of Italian descent moving to Italy. Excellent idea. As long as...
As long as it does not become yet another HBO postcard with exposed beams, lemons, grandmothers, one-euro houses and nostalgia in tomato sauce.
According to Variety, David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, is considering a new television or film project about four Italian Americans who move to Italy and buy property in the “old country”. The idea, mentioned during a public conversation at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, taps into a real and increasingly visible phenomenon: Americans, many of them with Italian roots, looking at Italy not simply as a holiday destination or a family memory, but as a possible place to live, invest, start again, retire, work remotely or, at the very least, breathe a little differently.
You can read the ‘original’ Italian version of this article on ‘Esco quando voglio’
Dear Mr Chase,
May I call you David?
Actually, perhaps not. There is always the risk that somewhere in New Jersey someone still believes respect begins with a surname and ends with a very serious conversation in front of a tray of baked ziti.
So, Mr Chase.
I read that you might like to make a film, or perhaps a television series, about four Italian Americans who buy property in Italy and return to the “old country”: that mysterious ancestral place which, for many Americans of Italian descent, is at once a real country, a family mythology, a sepia photograph on a sideboard, a grandmother who would never forgive supermarket sauce, and a geographical confusion in which Naples, Sicily, Molise and “somewhere near Rome” often end up in the same emotional drawer.
The idea is wonderful.
Truly.
Not because I wish to flatter the man who did more for the Italian American imagination than most tourist boards, restaurant chains and family therapists combined. Not because The Sopranos turned a very specific corner of New Jersey into one of the great psychological landscapes of modern television. And not because Italian Americans moving to Italy is suddenly fashionable enough to deserve the usual treatment: a Vespa, a lemon tree, a table in a piazza, an elderly woman making pasta and a golden retriever called Dante.
The idea is wonderful because, finally, someone seems to have understood that the story of Italian Americans does not have to be told, yet again, through organised crime, second-generation trauma, Sunday lunch, the overbearing mother, the cousin who knows a guy, the butcher’s shop with a suspicious back room, the red-and-white checked tablecloth and the unavoidable line delivered in a Little Italy accent by a character born in suburban New Jersey who works in private equity.
But precisely because the idea is so good, one must be careful.
Very careful.
The danger is not artistic risk. Artistic risk would be welcome. The real danger is the updated cliché: no longer the Italian American in a vest and gold chain saying “mamma mia” in front of a bowl of spaghetti, but the Italian American in a linen shirt, Panama hat and Instagram account called “Our Little Tuscan Dream”, who buys a one-euro house in an “undiscovered” village, discovers that the roof will cost €180,000, argues with three surveyors, two cousins of the seller and a municipal planning office open only on Tuesdays from 10.12 to 10.47, and gradually realises that the real mafia was never the one in the films, but the building quote sent on WhatsApp with no VAT, no date and no shame.
That is the series.
Not the romantic return to the land of the ancestors.
Not the postcard with the Vespa, the sunset and the glass of wine overlooking a hill which, in the meantime, the neighbour has already promised to sell to a German.
The real story is much funnier, crueller, warmer and more contemporary than that: thousands of Americans, many of them with Italian origins that are genuine, presumed, reconstructed, dreamt of or certified by a great-grandfather born in the province of Avellino in 1898, are looking at Italy not as a genealogical museum, but as a possible way out. Out of American anxiety. Out of the cost of living. Out of healthcare as an extreme sport. Out of screaming politics. Out of suburban loneliness. Out of the feeling that the American promise, for many people, has become a premium subscription with fewer and fewer services included.
And Italy, with all its defects, has suddenly become an answer again.
Not always the right answer.
Not always the easy answer.
But a possible answer.
That is where the real narrative material begins.
Because the Italy these Americans discover is not the Italy they inherited through family stories. It is not the still, sacred country of the grandmother. It is not a permanent nativity scene. It is not a theme park of roots. It is not the “old country” patiently waiting to be rediscovered by four emotional grandchildren with blue passports and an alarming confidence in their pronunciation of bruschetta.
Contemporary Italy is alive, complicated, seductive, maddening, beautiful and administratively sadistic. It is a place where you can have the best lunch of your life for eighteen euros and then lose six months trying to understand why the local authority cannot find a floor plan. It is a country where a depopulated village may indeed offer you a house at a symbolic price, but will then, quite reasonably, ask you to restore it, respect planning restrictions, file paperwork, pay professionals and understand the difference between habitability, compliance, cadastral status, planning status, residence, domicile and that mysterious Italian zone of existence in which everything “can be done” until you ask someone to put it in writing.
It is a country where an American arrives thinking he has to learn Italian and discovers that the first real language to learn is surveyorese.
An ancient tongue, harder than Latin, based on expressions such as “we need to see what is registered at the Comune”, “cadastrally it is one thing, urbanistically another”, “the file is almost ready”, “we only need one signature”, “the technician is on holiday” and “we’ll update each other after Ferragosto”, which in Italy means a period somewhere between 16 August and the moral end of Western civilisation.
And yet, precisely there, in that friction between dream and reality, heritage and bureaucracy, nostalgia and Google Translate, the promise of a slower life and the discovery that slowness too has a competent office, there is an enormous story.
Not a story about Italian Americans going back.
A story about Italian Americans going forward.
Because the word “return” is already a trap. You return to a place you know. You return to a home waiting for you. You return to something that has stood still while you were elsewhere. But those arriving in Italy today from the United States, even when they have an Italian surname, even when they have obtained citizenship by descent, even when they know how to cook their grandmother’s meatballs and weep over a great-grandfather’s birth certificate, are not really returning.
They are arriving.
And arriving is far more interesting than returning.
Arriving means discovering that real Italy coincides neither with American nostalgia nor with Italian cynicism. That it is not all dolce vita, but it is not merely decline either. That villages are not abandoned film sets waiting for a foreign protagonist, but often fragile, suspicious, generous, wounded communities full of memory and practical problems. That buying a house does not mean buying belonging. That the country does not need yet another foreigner in love with the view, but people capable of staying, investing, understanding, respecting, participating, paying taxes and repairing roofs without turning every wall into “authentic rustic chic” for Airbnb.
And here, Mr Chase, one must be even more careful.
Because when Hollywood sees Italy, it often loses all glycaemic control. Cue the music. Enter the market. An old woman kneads something. A priest crosses the square. A moustached man says something wise. An American woman rediscovers herself thanks to a plate of pasta, an emotionally available builder or an inherited property which, in real life, would be blocked by seven co-heirs, two mortgages and a succession file left unresolved since 1974.
Enough.
Really, enough.
Italy does not need another story in which the country functions as low-cost therapy for exhausted Americans. And Italian Americans do not need another story in which their identity is reduced to sauce, blood, saints, surname and a few Italian words pronounced with the serene authority of someone who has never had to face a tobacconist in order to buy a revenue stamp.
What is interesting today is far more adult.
It is the meeting of two crises.
On one side, America, with part of its professional and middle class looking outwards not for tourism, but for possibility. On the other, Italy, with whole territories full of empty houses, closing schools, local economies to revive, communities that would like new residents but do not always know how to welcome them, and a public machine capable of simultaneously desiring foreign investment and discouraging it with paperwork that appears to have been written by Franz Kafka after a long condominium meeting.
In the middle are the Americans who arrive.
Some have money, others do not. Some are looking for a peaceful retirement, others want to work remotely. Some pursue Italian citizenship as destiny, others simply want to live somewhere where bread tastes like bread and not like morally responsible foam. Some idealise Italy in a way that is both touching and unbearable. Others arrive prepared, study, ask questions, compare, understand that Milan is not a village, that Tuscany is not automatically affordable, that the South is not one single sunset, and that living in a historic centre is delightful until you have to carry a washing machine up three flights of medieval stairs designed when the main logistics provider was a mule.
Some make it.
Some run away.
Some stay and become more Italian than the Italians, which means they begin complaining about everything with great competence, while having absolutely no intention of leaving.
That is the material.
Forget “four Italian Americans in the land of their ancestors”.
Try four people who think they are buying a house and discover they have purchased an identity crisis with a panoramic view.
Four people who arrive with the idea of the “old country” and find a new country: more global, more contradictory, more fragile, more interesting. A country where a Calabrian village can speak to Brooklyn, a retired man from New Jersey can bring an Abruzzese house back to life, a designer from San Francisco can fall in love with the Marche and then go mad because fibre broadband reaches the square but not her desk, a former executive can reinvent himself in Puglia and discover that the real culture shock is not lunch at two o’clock, but the fact that the accountant does not answer emails with the urgency he spent thirty years expecting from Slack.
And then there is the work I do every day.
Yes, I know. This is the part where the article risks becoming self-promotional. So let me say it badly, in order to keep it elegant.
Mr Chase, before this story is handed to someone who thinks “moving to Italy” means lining up a grandmother, a Vespa, a one-euro house and a man called Giuseppe who fixes everything with a smile, it might be useful to speak with people who actually see this happen. Not from an academic observatory, not from a real estate agency disguised as poetry, not from the marketing office of a municipality that has recently discovered Canva, but from inside that strange, growing, often chaotic and very concrete flow connecting Italians abroad, Italian descendants, Americans in love with Italy, professionals escaping hyper-productivity, curious retirees, cautious investors, families looking for another rhythm, villages hoping to come back to life and territories that do not want to become mere scenery for the next reel.
Through ITS Italy, ITS Journal, Esco Quando Voglio, We the Italians and the whole ecosystem around these conversations, I have not been looking at this phenomenon since yesterday morning because Variety published an article. I have been intercepting it for years: through readers, numbers, events, enquiries, stories, fears, enthusiasm, mistakes, quotes, houses seen, houses dreamt of, houses bought, houses absolutely not to buy, Americans asking whether they can live in Tuscany with cypress views for 80,000 dollars and Italians replying, “Of course — perhaps in 1997.”
And that is exactly the point: if this story is to be told, it must be told neither as a fairy tale nor as a sneer. Or rather, it should be mocked just enough to save it from rhetoric, but not so much that one fails to see its power.
Because, yes, it is funny.
It is funny when an American arrives convinced that “a house in Italy” is a product, like a Netflix subscription with exposed beams. It is funny when an Italian seller describes a ruin as needing “just a refresh” while plants inside appear to have their own tax code. It is funny when a mayor wants to attract new residents but has a website last updated in 2016. It is funny when a notary pronounces “smart working” as though it were a tropical disease. It is funny when a country dreams of foreign investors and then treats as suspicious anyone who asks for a written answer within the week.
But beneath the comedy there is something serious.
There is a diaspora that is no longer merely memory, but an emotional and economic infrastructure. There are millions of people with an Italian connection, strong or faint, who today are not only asking where their grandparents came from, but where they themselves might go. There is an inland Italy that needs new inhabitants, not extras. There are local communities that could be revived, but only if the arrival of foreigners does not become aesthetic colonisation, property speculation or permanent tourism disguised as residence. There is a huge opportunity to turn nostalgia into project, genealogy into active citizenship, the dream of a house into a real relationship with a territory.
And there is something else which may interest you most of all, Mr Chase: moral contradiction.
Because these characters must not be saints.
Please, no.
Let us not make them four pure souls arriving in Italy to rediscover lost authenticity. Authenticity is a dangerous word, especially when used by someone who has just bought an industrial lamp made in China in order to make an Umbrian farmhouse feel more “real”.
Make them flawed.
One arrives because he can no longer stand America, but continues to behave as though every country should function according to American rules. One wants to “reconnect with his roots”, but knows nothing about contemporary Italy and confuses family history with an automatic right to be welcomed as the prodigal son. One buys as an investment and is then surprised when the village does not wish to become a dormitory for foreigners. One is genuinely in love with Italy, but must learn that loving a country also means accepting that the country may say no, make you wait, contradict you, disappoint you and ask you to understand before you transform.
And then give us the Italians.
Not as folkloric extras.
Not the wise farmer. Not the widow who teaches pasta. Not the visionary mayor with a tricolour sash and a heart of gold. Or at least, not only them.
Give us the owner who has allowed a house to rot for thirty years and triples the price the moment he hears an American accent. The excellent technician who is impossible to pin down. The young architect who understands everything and must mediate between regulations, dreams, budgets and stones from 1600 that refuse to be moved. The neighbour who is suspicious at first and then brings tomatoes. The barman who knows everything about the village but says nothing until you have ordered at least twelve coffees. The public official who looks like the antagonist but is in fact trying to prevent someone from turning a protected former chicken shed into a “boutique retreat”. The Italian cousin who appears as soon as citizenship, inheritance or sale is mentioned, because in Italy blood matters, but the land registry matters more.
That would be a series worth watching.
A series in which Italy does not automatically save anyone, but forces everyone to renegotiate who they are.
A series in which the American discovers that living better does not mean living without problems, but choosing problems that at least come with a decent view and a serious dinner at the end of the day.
A series in which the Italian discovers that these Americans are not merely tourists with larger budgets, but people who may bring energy, relationships, attention, new questions and, yes, a little healthy naivety — the kind sometimes needed to reopen doors that Italians had closed out of cynicism, exhaustion or the conviction that “nothing ever changes here”.
And a series in which the real twist, in the end, is not who betrays whom, who buys what, who inherits the house, who gets the permit, who discovers the family secret or who lied about the square footage.
The real twist is that Italy, despite everything, works.
Not always.
Not well.
Not as it should.
Not without swearing, certified emails, revenue stamps and a quantity of patience which in the United States would probably be medicalised.
But it works in its own human, imperfect, relational, infuriating and marvellous way. It works because, eventually, someone opens a door. Someone explains. Someone helps. Someone cheats you, of course, but that too is part of the curriculum. Someone invites you to lunch. Someone tells you, “Leave that house alone, I know a better one.” Someone puts you in touch with the right technician. Someone makes you understand that you are not buying only walls, but a position within a community.
And so yes, perhaps David Chase is exactly the right person to tell this story.
Because The Sopranos, beneath everything the public later fetishised, did not work simply because there were gangsters. It worked because it took an already exhausted imagination and hollowed it out from within. It showed men who believed themselves to be epic protagonists while they were often small, fragile, ridiculous, depressed and imprisoned by an inherited script. It understood that identity, when it becomes performance, can become a cage.
And today, Italian American identity, when it meets real Italy, needs precisely that: to be freed from its costume.
No more caricatures.
No more mafia as narrative shortcut.
No more Italy as colour therapy.
No more villages as backdrops for Americans in search of themselves.
Let us do something harder, and therefore more interesting: tell the story of people who arrive in Italy thinking they will find an answer and instead discover a much larger question.
What remains of origin when it stops being nostalgia and becomes a daily choice?
What does it mean to be Italian when a surname, a recipe, a family memory or a certificate found in an archive is no longer enough?
What happens when an old, depopulated, bureaucratic and beautiful country meets people arriving from a powerful, tired, nervous country full of money, fear and the desire to escape?
And above all: who changes whom?
Does the American change the village, or does the village change the American?
Does Italy welcome new citizens, or slowly absorb them until, after two years, they begin every sentence with “the problem with this country is...” and end it by saying they would not live anywhere else?
So, Mr Chase.
This is the story.
I am here.
Not because I presume to teach you how to write a scene. That would be like explaining the chisel to Michelangelo, or telling Carmela Soprano how to organise a dinner with guilt built into the menu.
But with a simple suggestion: before someone turns this intuition into a sequence of lemons, invented dialects, gifted houses, picturesque Italians and Americans redeemed by pecorino, come and speak with those who are seeing this new migration up close, every day, in emails, newsletters, events, reader stories and in the plans of people who want to leave, return, arrive, invest, understand and make fewer expensive mistakes.
Because Italian Americans moving to Italy are not a lifestyle-magazine trend.
They are a political, cultural, real-estate, family, economic, comic and deeply human story.
Told well, it could genuinely be something new.
Told badly, it will be just another one-euro house bought at a very high price.
And believe me, I have seen that already.
Even without HBO.