There is a statement which, in recent years – and even more so in recent weeks – has become one of the most effective slogans of sovereignist rhetoric: “Migrants threaten our culture”.
It is a simple, immediate phrase, capable of arousing fear even before it prompts reflection. Like all effective slogans, it thrives on its own apparent self-evidence: there is a ‘our’ culture – defined, homogeneous, immutable – and anyone arriving from outside risks contaminating it.

The problem is that this claim does not stand up to serious historical and anthropological analysis.
Not because immigration does not pose real problems – it would be naive to deny that – but because Italian culture has simply never existed in the static and ‘pure’ form that certain propaganda imagines.

If there is one characteristic that runs through three thousand years of the Italian peninsula’s history, it is precisely the opposite: constant cultural exchange. Italy has become what it is today thanks to encounters, exchanges, invasions, periods of domination, trade, translations, pilgrimages and migrations. Its identity does not stem from isolation, but from openness.

Italy has almost never been a single Italy

Before we even talk about Italian culture, we should ask ourselves one question: is there really just one Italian culture?

When the Kingdom of Italy was founded in 1861, only a small minority of the population spoke Italian. Almost everyone communicated in dozens of languages and hundreds of dialectal variants. Sardinians, Piedmontese, Sicilians, Friulians, Venetians, Neapolitans, Ligurians and Calabrians lived in profoundly different cultural worlds.

The historian Massimo D’Azeglio summed up this reality with a phrase that has since become famous: “Now that Italy has been created, we must create Italians”.

It wasn’t a joke. It was an observation that Italians, as a unified cultural community, did not yet exist. Instead, there were many ‘Italies’. Lombard Italy, Byzantine Italy, Norman Italy, Aragonese Italy, Savoyard Italy, Venetian Italy, Papal Italy, Bourbon Italy.

Even today, to speak of ‘Italian identity’ in the singular is to oversimplify a reality that is infinitely richer.

The spectre of the ‘mixed-race society’

Among the buzzwords that have recently found their way into the vocabulary of a right-wing that even disparages the term ‘futurist’, there is one that is particularly revealing: ‘mixed-race society’.
The expression is used with a clearly negative connotation, as if it were describing a downward spiral that must be halted, a process of the dissolution of national identity, almost a disease of modernity. Yet few phrases are so far removed from Italy’s historical reality.

For if there is one European people that, over the millennia, has been shaped by constant intermingling, it is precisely the Italian people. To speak today of ‘racial mixing’ as a danger is to ignore three thousand years of history. The Italian peninsula has never been an isolated land, let alone an ethnically homogeneous community. Since ancient times, it has been the main crossroads of the Mediterranean, the place where peoples, languages, religions and cultures have met, clashed and ultimately merged.

The Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Celts, Ligurians, ancient Veneti, Italics and Romans all contributed to the formation of Italy. Subsequently, the Goths, Lombards, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, Spaniards, French and Austrians arrived. Each has left a profound mark on the linguistic heritage, folk traditions, architecture, cuisine, law, music and even the genetic heritage of the peoples of the peninsula.

Historical, archaeological and genetic research, in fact, tells a story that is diametrically opposed to the rhetoric of purity.

Italians are among the European peoples with the greatest genetic diversity, precisely because their history is that of a peninsula open to trade, migration, conquest and cultural exchange. There is no such thing as an ‘Italian genome’, just as there has never been an ‘Italian race’. What exists is a community built up over time through continuous external influences, which have been reworked and transformed until they became an integral part of our identity.

For this reason, raising the spectre of a ‘mixed-race society’ today does not mean defending Italian culture, but rather denying its very foundations. It is a curious paradox: those who claim to want to protect national identity end up portraying an Italy that has never existed. An Italy that is static, pure, impervious to external influences. An ideological invention, not a historical reality.

The truth is exactly the opposite. Italy has become Italy precisely because it has been a melting pot. Not in spite of these influences, but thanks to them.
Our identity is not the product of isolation, but rather of our ability to absorb, reinterpret and transform different cultures into something new and original. If there is one lesson that the history of the peninsula teaches us, it is precisely this: cultural mixing is not the exception in our national history; it is the rule. And to turn this into a bogeyman today is to deny what we have been for over two millennia. It is hard to imagine a more glaring contradiction: we claim to be defending Italian identity whilst fighting the very historical process that created it.

The peninsula that has never ceased to be part of the Mediterranean

Geography matters. Italy is a long peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean, and for millennia the Mediterranean has not been a boundary, but the world’s greatest trade and cultural highway. The Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Etruscans and Romans built civilisations that were constantly intertwined.
Magna Graecia is not a marginal episode in Italian history: it constitutes one of its pillars.
Crotone, Taranto and Syracuse were centres where philosophy, mathematics, medicine and theatre first emerged.

When Rome conquered the Mediterranean, it did not eradicate that culture: it absorbed it. It is one of the first great examples of cultural fusion. Horace himself acknowledges this in a remarkable phrase: “Conquered Greece conquered the crude conqueror.”

Christianity originated outside Europe

There is also a paradox that often escapes the very people who invoke ‘Christian roots’.

Christianity, which is one of the cornerstones of Italian and European culture, did not originate in Europe.
It originated in Palestine; the Gospels were written in Greek; Jesus was Jewish; and the apostles came from the Near East. The first Christian communities developed in Syria, Anatolia and Egypt. Even before it reached Rome, Christianity was already a profoundly Mediterranean religion.

To defend Christianity in the name of ‘Western purity’ is to forget that it is itself the result of an encounter between different cultures and peoples.

St Augustine: one of the founding fathers of Europe was African

A prime example is that of St Augustine, one of the greatest philosophers in Western history.

His thought permeates the whole of European culture: he influenced (to name but a few thinkers) Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Luther, Descartes and Pascal.
Yet Augustine was born in Tagaste, in what is now Algeria. He was African, spoke Latin, studied rhetoric, lived in Milan and became bishop of Hippo. Within him coexisted the Roman world, African culture, Greek philosophy and the Christian tradition.

One of the cornerstones of European culture is therefore the result of a Mediterranean fusion.

Foreign rule did not destroy Italy: it built it

For over a thousand years, the Italian peninsula has been subject to a succession of ruling powers, each of which has left its mark.

In Southern Italy, the Arabs introduced advanced agricultural techniques, irrigation systems and new crops. Citrus fruits, cotton, rice, aubergines, artichokes, spinach and sugar were introduced.

Words that are extremely common today derive directly from Arabic. European mathematics itself owes a great deal to the transmission of Arabic knowledge, which preserved, translated and developed Greek philosophy at a time when much of Western Europe had lost it.

Even the Renaissance, often hailed as the pinnacle of Italian genius, is the result of cultural exchange.

The fall of Constantinople brought hundreds of Byzantine scholars to Italy, who arrived bearing Greek manuscripts that had long been forgotten in the West: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and all the ‘Greek Fathers’.

The rediscovery of antiquity was also made possible by these intellectuals who had fled their homelands. Without that migration, the Renaissance would have been different or, perhaps, would not even have existed in the form we know it.

Humanism and the Enlightenment

Humanism is bringing about a revolution. It does not place race, nation or ethnicity at the centre. It places the human being at the centre.

Pico della Mirandola writes that man does not possess a fixed nature but freely shapes his own being. It is one of the most radical assertions of modernity.

Identity becomes openness, possibility, freedom. Not closed-mindedness.

The Italian Enlightenment, too, was constantly engaging in dialogue beyond ‘national borders’. Beccaria, Verri, Filangieri, Genovesi. Ideas crossed borders; reason became the common heritage of humanity. The struggle against torture, arbitrary rule and the death penalty arose from international dialogue, not from isolation.

The Risorgimento envisaged citizens, not subjects

Even the Risorgimento does not have a ‘national’ scope .

Mazzini speaks of brother nations; Cavour looks to European modernisation; Garibaldi even fights in South America.

The concept of the nation that emerged in the nineteenth century is very different from the ethnic concept put forward today by identity-based nationalism: it is a political community founded on citizenship, not on blood ties.

Even what we consider to be ‘typically Italian’ has its roots far away

The kitchen is perhaps the most obvious example.

Tomatoes come from the Americas, as do maize and potatoes. Rice comes from Asia; citrus fruits were spread by the Arabs; aubergines come from the East; spinach from Persia; coffee from Ethiopia via the Arab world; and sugar from India.

Dried pasta has become extraordinarily widespread in Southern Italy, partly thanks to techniques developed in the Islamic Mediterranean.

If we were to strip Italian cuisine of everything that comes from other cultures, very little would remain of what we now call ‘tradition’. And yet no one would say that a pizza with tomato isn’t Italian simply because the tomato isn’t.

Culture works in exactly the same way: it absorbs, transforms and reinvents.

The ‘true Italian identity’ is the ability to transform

This is probably the most distinctive feature of Italian history.

Italy rarely invents things entirely from scratch; more often than not, it takes various elements and transforms them into something new. This has been the case in art, philosophy, cuisine, architecture, music and language.

Even the Italian language originated from the fusion of Latin, regional vernaculars and foreign influences.

Do migrants really pose a threat to culture?

The question, therefore, is not whether migrants pose a threat to a static culture, because that static culture has never existed.

The real question is whether a society is capable of incorporating new influences whilst keeping its core values alive, and Italian history shows that it has done so for centuries.

This does not mean denying the difficulties of integration, nor does it imply that every migration phenomenon is automatically positive.

It means distinguishing between concrete problems — to be addressed through effective policies, respect for the law and pathways to inclusion — and a narrative that blames migrants for the supposed ‘end of Italian culture’. These are two different matters.

If there is one thing that can impoverish Italian culture today, it is not contact with other cultures, but the abandonment of curiosity and the reduction of complexity to slogans.

It is the belief that history can be rewritten by transforming a civilisation born of encounters into a civilisation of separation.

Italy rose to greatness when it was able to embrace ideas, people and knowledge, and reinterpret them in an original way. It produced Dante and Leonardo, Michelangelo and Galileo, Beccaria and Verdi – not because it was a closed fortress, but because it was a crossroads of languages, trade, universities, pilgrims and artists.

That is why the claim that ‘migrants threaten our culture’ is not merely debatable: historically speaking, it is utter nonsense. Italian culture is not an archaeological artefact to be preserved under a glass dome. It is a living tradition, built up over time by a diversity of peoples, ideas and influences.

If there is such a thing as an Italian identity, it does not lie in the purity of its origins, but in its extraordinary ability to transform encounters into civilisation. And it is perhaps precisely this that is the most profound lesson which its history offers to the present day.