Talking about Italy is entering into a complex discourse: a short stop and an infinite journey at the same time, through history, traditions, intersecting cultures, provincial lives, urban suggestions and natural landscapes. It is telling of a dense network of towns and metropolitan areas where many beauties are still precluded, opening up to outdated rhythms; it is to stay between the ancient splendor of the past and a contradictory present of metropolitan areas that push towards a controversial future made up of ethical contacts or clashes, constructive acknowledgments and old clichés.

Who are the Italians nowadays and how has their relationship with the sense of belonging to the nation changed? From the efforts of identity cohesion of post-unity to the tiring tensions of the twentieth century, passing through Made in Italy, fashionable songs and constantly changing values, is it really appropriate, in a multicultural and digitized society, to speak today of territorial borders and identities? In the plural and virtual square of the world, what can the new Italians, second generation immigrants bring? Are there common expectations or do the economic and social achievements go in the direction of unbridled individualisms?

From the passion (sometime rhetorical, sometime authentic) towards his language to the international scenarios of Europe and the Mediterranean, Italy is a heterogeneous, multiple country, which moves between community values ​​and stereotyped resistance. A country that must be told and glimpsed in its potential for growth and development; that remains obscure, in some respects, in its veiled archeology of timeless knowledge: a very different country, from north to south, whose name in history still exerts a great charm.

Chi sono gli Italiani di oggi e come è cambiato il loro rapporto con il senso d’appartenenza alla nazione? Dagli sforzi di coesione identitaria del post unità alle faticose tensioni del Novecento, passando per il Made in Italy, canzonette alla moda e  valori in costante cambiamento, è veramente opportuno, in una società multiculturale e digitalizzata, parlare oggi di confini e identità territoriali? Nella plurima e virtuale piazza del mondo, cosa possono portare i nuovi italiani, immigrati di seconda generazione? Esistono delle aspettative comuni o le conquiste economiche e sociali vanno nella direzione di individualismi sfrenati?