Return to Roots: Belonging as a Beginning

At fifteen, my parents uprooted me from my Canadian life and brought me “back” to Italy, as they called it. But how do you return to a place you have never actually lived in? I felt an unexpected paradox. I belonged to a place I’d never fully known. And yet, through my parents’ stories, the connection was already there even though I barely understood the country until I walked its streets myself.

Growing up with first-generation immigrant parents in Canada, we had a clear sense of what our roots were: family rituals, food, summer visits to their hometowns, and a deep emotional attachment to a country they had left behind. I expected to find the Italy I had inherited through my parents, but I soon realized their version was only one version of it. Living there revealed something else entirely.

The foundations were still there, values, rituals, ways of relating but the country itself had continued to evolve. Society had changed, conversations had shifted, and traditions were being carried forward in dialogue with a world my parents had not lived in. My roots had not...

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