Meeting Distant Relatives in Italy

[mongoh]

Hello all and thank you for taking the time to read this message.

My father passed away in 2023 and it inspired me to create a family tree with the ultimate goal of traveling to Italy to see where we come from and potentially meet any distant relatives still living in the area.

I have read mix reviews of the Italians view on this. Many comments I have read state things like "your italian ancestors do not care to meet you" and that this is "American main character energy that is joked about amongst Italians".

Do you, either as an Italian or someone who has met distant Italian relatives, feel like this is the case?

My goal of meeting them would just be to talk about family history, talk about life it Italy, share some photos and maybe find some Italian Traditions I can bring back home and incorporate into my American lifestyle. My father's Italian heritage was very important to him, and my hope was that a trip and meeting like this would bring me closer to him, in a weird way.

Thanks for any insight you are able to provide!

P.S I hope this is the right topic to post this in. If not, I will delete and change! Thanks!

[qualdom]

I think the reality is that most Italians regard Italian-Americans as Americans and they don't feel any more affinity towards you than they would towards an African-American.

As American myself, I find it very peculiar that so many Americans are so fascinated with their Italian heritage at a time when family bonds (and social bonds in general) are declining so precipitously in the United States. It seems really contradictory to me. It gives me the impression that obtaining an Italian passport is really just a status symbol for most Americans.

Nevertheless, Italians are individuals just like any other nationality. So you can disregard my words because I'm sure you will find distant cousins who will be sincerely happy to meet you.

[mongoh]

I think the reality is that most Italians regard Italian-Americans as Americans and they don't feel any more affinity towards you than they would towards an African-American.

As American myself, I find it very peculiar that so many Americans are so fascinated with their Italian heritage at a time when family bonds (and social bonds in general) are declining so precipitously in the United States. It seems really contradictory to me. It gives me the impression that obtaining an Italian passport is really just a status symbol for most Americans.

Nevertheless, Italians are individuals just like any other nationality. So you can disregard my words because I'm sure you will find distant cousins who will be sincerely happy to meet you.

Thanks for the response. While I cannot speak for society as a whole, family relationship are important to me and I think it would be cool to find a distant relative in Italy who values the same and is open to meeting.

I agree that the dual-citizenship desire of American's have turned from searching to connect with distant family to a document grab, in which I can understand the unwillingness of your Italian descendants to help out. This made a lot of sense so I appreciate the time!

[shufflewise]

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[darkerhorse]

I'm sure it's a mixed bag as you noted. And there's a kernel of truth in what Qualdom wrote about Italian-Americans being viewed as Americans by Italians. My great-aunt in America used to call recent Italian newcomers "greenies" as a derogatory term. I wouldn't be surprised if some Italians in Italy also have negative appellations for us.

Having said that, in the 1990s I visited my ancestral town, a small, rural and poor town in Sicily. I had no identifiable relatives (they all came here or had died there!) but I was very welcomed by the town's people (I met mostly retirees or unemployed men hanging out in or near the bar, as my visits were in the daytime. I also encountered friendly government officials, bankers, shopkeepers, etc.). It might have helped that I had a common surname for that town, and I live close to their sister town in the US (so many have immigrated from that town to this town, that they are officially designated as sister towns with many family connections across the ocean. Of course, that was a different world back then and the older generation has died out.

From the airport I happened to board a school bus (autobus) by mistake. It took me to my destination anyways and the bus driver and children were very friendly. The only somewhat negative encounter I had was when organized crime acted up while I was there.
A second difficulty was when I ventured out of my ancestral province to an urban area some distance away.

So, my (positive) experience was unique, and it was to visit a town, not to visit distant relatives. I was comfortable and I felt welcomed and wanted. I suppose it might have been different if my ancestral town had been in the north or in an urban area.

[parkergambino]

"My father's Italian heritage was very important to him, and my hope was that a trip and meeting like this would bring me closer to him, in a weird way."

To me what is weird is that people don't feel the way that you do. My experience is that vast numbers of people are thoroughly indifferent to their family history beyond, perhaps, their grandparents. In other words, unless they experienced someone personally, or the person has some tangible effect on their life, why bother? It would be easy to veer off here into a screed commentary about the human condition, but we have better things to focus our attention on!

Mixed bag is probably the best summary. My sample size of personal experience is small, a single visit to Castelbuono. I tracked down the relatives, notified them in advance of our arrival (core family of 6), including a picture of what we looked like. We were warmly welcomed and were included in several large family activities of the "feast" variety. It was one of the more profound experiences of my life. The visit was much too brief for my liking (I was not in charge of our group logistics), and there was plenty more that I wanted to do, so I'm planning a next trip, to be more unfettered. Of course, there was variation in the degree of enthusiasm among the ~20 people we met, but there was a core of kin who were very interested, and they carried the day.

A distant American cousin (not from Castelbuono) who had visited a village in Palermo district had an interesting experience. I had tracked down this cousin, and we met in New York to say hi and swap a few family lore stories. She and her husband had visited the ancestral location, without having direct knowledge of specific relatives; they explained their mission to a few of the locals who were all "Oh, it's so wonderful that you have come to learn about your ancestors and heritage, who is your family, maybe we can help you find them ... blah blah blah." When my cousins mentioned the surname (you may recognize it in my tag) as one associated with a degree of notoriety, immediately there was a 180-degree pivot in the attitude of the natives: "Sorry, we don't know anything, can't help you, goodbye." My research suggested that this long-ago relative was the first with the surname to live in that village. My best guess is that when he moved there from Palermo city (mid-late 19th century), he either brought a lot of trouble with him, or generated it on his own.

I had heard that in some situations, the wariness of Italian residents might be due to suspicions that us foreigners might be coming to make some claim on real estate or other family-connected resources.

I hadn't really considered the 2nd-passport-as-status-symbol issue before. I have some inclination to obtain one - my son is well along in the application process - but it would be with an eye to practical matters. It is naive to think that politics does not play into the various issues connected to Americans travelling abroad, including the wishes of visitors to Europe to not be painted with a broad brush, 'nuff said

Parker