Nationalism is more nuanced when you’re from an Anglo-Italian family. And this tournament has been about more than football: it’s a celebration of diversity
Being a football fan is all about longing and belonging. As a supporter, you yearn not only for sporting glory but also, through your team, to understand where you come from and where your real home is. So Sunday evening’s final is something most of us Anglo-Italian hybrid families have hoped for and dreaded: it’s the big one, the game when we’re asked to make a choice between our home country and our adopted one, between our spouses and our siblings, between our English parents and our Italian children (or vice versa).
In times of mass migration, being a hyphenated nationality is obviously ever more common. I and my two brothers added one nationality each to our family’s little gene puddle. There were, at last count, about 600,000 Italians in the UK (not only in England), and about 30,000 Britons (not just English) in Italy. Love stories and offspring are almost as inevitable as this final.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3xzI0RB
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