Story II - ‘extracomunitario’
Belonging
My way of finding home was to meet with other Italians.
After now it's four years that I'm living here, I feel at home when I’m in London actually, so now for me London is my place. And yeah, actually what I created after COVID was a sort of an aggregation point in my house with my girlfriend and friends – most of them are Italian but also because of the type of job of my girlfriend and what I do we have a lot of also other nationality coming and a lot of UK people. I love to cook, I like to make dinner where I invite people and we do small parties so this is what it feels to have sort of a home, a nest, a family to me at the moment.
I'm a millennial and I am surrounded by people who are in their 30s, we just got out of relationships or don't want a relationship, so I think that London let us to have this kind of hybrid family that would be really difficult to have somewhere else.
Journey
I actually chose the UK in a sort of random way because I was looking for good places with good university and I met one of the most important professors in my field who was actually working in the UK. So before that, I wasn't really considering the UK.
The difficult part of moving at 30 or so to a new city as big as London is that you feel extremely alone at the beginning. It's really difficult to recreate a new group of people, to have somebody who you can call when you’re tired or when there is a problem.
Identity
I always think of this word in Italian that is ‘extracomunitario’, that means from outside of the European community. And then I actually understood that I became a sort of extracomunitario as well. So yeah, I tend to forget about that but when I think about myself, yes, I'm an immigrant, a privileged immigrant actually, because I'm European and also came at the right moment, before Brexit, so I got the pre-settled status etc.
Because of this connection, I have a lot of Italian friends who are coming after Brexit, and I tried to help them to sort out their visa. I can really see how privileged I was because I didn't have to actually fit into a category of a student or work visa but at the end I'm planning to try to apply for the British citizenship and to have dual citizenship. I mean I will never lose my European citizenship, but if I can also have the UK one, that would be great.
Immigrants are running the NHS. I mean, I can only talk about what I saw, and there are a lot of British people in the NHS, they are brilliant and they are great, but pretty much 80 per cent of the nurses and 50 per cent of the doctors were from somewhere else in the world and the NHS is a real melting pot. People need to understand that how the world is working now is also and mostly thanks to highly qualified immigrants that we are losing at the moment because it's really difficult to come here and work for the NHS.
