Italians have always been strong admirers of the British. Flickr/UKinItaly. Some rights reserved.I’m writing this from Italy, one of the most Anglophile countries on earth. Didn’t you know? Trust me: I hear in the streets that we’ve got young kids called Jennifer, Ryan, Kevin, and more. Hardly anyone bothers to call their children Maria or Giuseppe anymore. Too traditional.
Nevermind that people with an English first name and an Italian surname may sound like a character from The Godfather. People are not worried by that – and quite rightly so. Reaching out to foreign cultures, however goofily, is an act of curiosity and interest towards others.
Often, films and music – magic tools of the so-called ‘soft power’ – have gently pushed people to study English in their spare time too, away from school desks. As the seasoned journalist Beppe Severgnini recently said while commenting on Brexit for the Italian daily Corriere della Sera (Severgnini knows the UK like the back of his hand, having worked as a London correspondent first and for The Economist afterwards), “the English language doesn’t solely belong to the British, it belongs to us all.”
