What Happens to Italian Culture When Italians Leave Italy?

I came across Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU while looking through some university programs and events connected to Italian culture. I was expecting to find the usual things: Italian literature, cinema, art, maybe Dante or Renaissance history.

Instead, I found an event about something much more familiar to me: Italian food.

The event, called Why Bragga-don’t-cio?!, looked at how Italian culture and cuisine have evolved through the Italian diaspora, particularly in the United States.  

It made me think about something I had never really considered. We often talk about Italian culture as if it is something that exists inside Italy and is then carried abroad by Italians. But what happens after it leaves?

Because Italian food in Italy and Italian food in the United States aren’t always the same thing. Neither one is necessarily more “Italian” than the other. They have developed in different places, influenced by different communities and different histories.

And that is where this becomes more interesting than just a conversation about food.

Culture changes when people move

When people migrate, they don’t leave their culture completely behind. They bring recipes, traditions, language, music, religious celebrations and family habits with them. But those things don’t stay exactly the same.

They adapt to the new environment.

Ingredients might change because something isn’t available. A recipe might be altered because local tastes are different. A tradition might become even more important because it reminds people of home. At the same time, new influences enter the culture and become part of it.

Eventually, something new develops.

I think this is one of the reasons the idea of culture being “preserved” is actually more complicated than it sounds. If a culture never changed, would it still be alive?

Italian culture is a good example because so much of what we now think of as traditionally Italian has itself changed over time. Food, language, regional traditions and ideas about family have all developed through contact with other people and places.

The Italian culture that exists outside Italy is therefore not simply a copy of Italy.

It is its own thing.

Italian-American isn’t the same as Italian

This is something I find particularly interesting as someone who grew up outside Italy.

There is a difference between being Italian, being Italian-American, growing up in an Italian family abroad, and simply having Italian heritage. Those experiences can overlap, but they aren’t interchangeable.

Someone whose grandparents emigrated from Italy might have a very strong connection to Italian culture without having ever lived in Italy. Their version of Italian culture may include traditions that have changed or disappeared in Italy itself, while remaining important to their family.

In a way, migration can freeze some parts of a culture while completely changing others.

That made me think about my own relationship with Italian culture. Because I haven’t grown up entirely in Italy, I don’t experience “Italian” as one fixed thing. I notice the differences between the Italy I know through family, the Italy I experience when I visit, and the version of Italy that exists in people’s minds when they hear the word.

Sometimes those versions overlap.

Sometimes they really don’t.

So who gets to decide what counts as Italian?

I think that is the question I found most interesting in all of this.

We often use the word “authentic” when we talk about culture, especially food. We say something is authentic Italian, authentic Japanese, authentic Mexican, as though there is one original version that can be measured against everything else.

But cultures don’t really work like that.

People move. Recipes change. Languages evolve. Families combine traditions. New generations reinterpret what their parents taught them.

If Italian immigrants in America changed their food because of the ingredients available to them, does that make the result less Italian? Or does it show what Italian culture looked like when it met a completely different environment?

Maybe both can be true.

A culture can change and still remain connected to where it came from.

That is probably what I found most interesting about discovering Casa Italiana at NYU. Its approach to Italian culture isn’t limited to preserving a perfect version of the past. It creates a space for looking at how Italian culture continues to change through literature, cinema, music, politics, art and the experiences of Italians and Italian communities around the world.  

And maybe that is what makes culture interesting in the first place.

It isn’t something we inherit unchanged.

We keep remaking it.

Sources:

I came across Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at NYU while exploring the university’s Italian Studies and cultural programs. Casa Italiana describes itself as a space for dialogue between Italy and the United States and hosts events across Italian literature, cinema, music, theatre, visual arts, politics and economics.  

The idea for this post came from Why Bragga-don’t-cio?!, a March 2026 Casa Italiana event exploring how Italian culture and cuisine have evolved through the Italian diaspora.