Living in Europe at twenty-three

What three years of moving between London, Madrid and Paris taught me about belonging

Feeling European doesn't make you any less Italian. It just means realising that part of who you are, part of your freedom and your future, now plays out on a bigger stage than the national one.

Over the last couple of years I've learned, and relearned, that "home" can mean a lot of different things. Sometimes it's the people you know, a language you can get by in, a city you can find your way round with your eyes shut. Other times it's something harder to pin down, that sense of belonging to the same place even when the streets, the accents and the daily rhythms have all changed.

During my two-year master's I ended up living in three different cities, London, Madrid and Paris, miles away from what I'd always assumed was my one and only "home". Now that it's over, I can say with total confidence that "leaving home to go home will forever be the weirdest feeling" was, for me, spot on. Every time I left Italy I was homesick before I'd even left, and buzzing to get to the home I'd built for myself somewhere else. Looking back, moving between countries felt less like moving house and more like wandering through different rooms of the same one. Not because the rooms were identical, some felt instantly familiar, others took real effort to work out, but because what tied them together wasn't the absence of difference. It was being able to move between them without every move feeling like a proper goodbye.

That, I think, might be the most honest version of what a European identity actually looks like. Not something that replaces being Italian, and not some flattened, one-size-fits-all culture that papers over what makes each country distinct, but a sense of belonging roomy enough to hold all of it at once.

The Europe we now cross borders in to go and study was built on a continent where those same borders had, not long before, been crossed by armies. In 1950, just five years after the war ended, Robert Schuman proposed pooling coal and steel production between former enemies. That wasn't just a trade deal, it meant sharing the very resources you'd need to fight another war, which made a fresh conflict between France and Germany far harder to pull off in practice. Italy was one of the six founding members of the European Coal and Steel Community. So Europe was never something Italy signed up to after the fact, and it's not some outside body handing down rules from on high. It's something we helped build from the ground up.

Europe doesn't shrink Italy, it gives Italy a weight it would really struggle to hold on its own in today's world. Surrounded, as we are now, by genuine superpowers, being part of something bigger isn't a loss of sovereignty. It's more or less the only way left to actually have any.

Oddly enough, it was London that made the value of all this click for me. London is European in every sense that has nothing to do with institutions, geographically, historically, culturally, its story is completely bound up with the continent's. And yet in everyday life, a different kind of distance kept surfacing. It had nothing to do with political speeches and everything to do with the paperwork, the small print, the documents you suddenly needed, the conversations about work and what comes next. Small stuff, but the kind that reminds you cultural closeness and political belonging aren't the same thing any more. Still deeply European, London just seemed to be watching the continent from slightly further down the road. That distance didn't break the ties. It just made them impossible not to notice.

In geopolitics, same as in life, it's only when a gap opens up that you notice everything you'd been taking for granted.

My generation grew up assuming, without really thinking about it, that you could just hop across a border, study abroad, make friends from three different countries, fall for someone from a fourth, and picture your future, career or otherwise, somewhere completely different from where you started out. The generation that built Europe knew exactly what they were running from. They'd lived through war, and borders weren't lines on a map to them, they were places where people actually fought and died.

Feeling European today means being properly aware of what's been handed to us, not to bang on about it uncritically or pretend the EU doesn't have real flaws, but to understand that those flaws don't make the original idea any less worth holding onto. Europe was never a finish line we crossed once and can now forget about. It's a political and cultural choice every generation has to keep making, so the space that holds us together now doesn't quietly start pulling us apart again.