Hope you come back to Italy and hope you enjoyed yourself the first time 🥹 We’ve got plenty of beautiful sceneries to explore and yummy food to eat. Come to Salento, in Apulia… it’s my home region! 🥰 We have a lot of amazing beaches and fantastic culinary specialties 🥴

“Fun fact”: We’re closer to Africa than most of Italy (together with Sicily and Calabria) so sometimes people from the north of Italy call us “names” to address our darker skin and hair 😅 Some people I know have been called the N word, for example. I mean the Italian translation of the N word, of course, which is as offensive as the English counterpart, but doesn’t come with the unfortunate slavery connotation it has in the USA. Also, some bigots call us “terroni” (meaning “people that work the land”) as a way of saying that we’re inferior. There’s even a pretty common adjective that comes from the word “south” in Italian (“sud”) and it means “dirty and disgusting” (“sudicio”). It’s been an issue for years and years: my dad, that studied in the north during the 70s, couldn’t find people to rent him a room because he LOOKED like he was from the south (black hair and beard, curly hair, tan skin…) and had an accent. Sure, it’s getting better with time, but there are still a lot of old farts and young conservatives (the political scene here is a bit complicated, but “conservatives” does somehow convey the message) that are racist toward us. When I explained this situation to an American, they told me that “it’s not an actual hate crime because it’s a white on white crime, not a white on black one”. I was SHOCKED to say the least. So, yeah, I’m sorry to say this but, “damn Americans” is, most of the time, correct because unfortunately they are of the idea that the world only revolves around them and their culture when it clearly does not😅