Italians

The Italians are a Romance ethnic group and nation native to the Italian peninsula and its neighboring insular territories. Most Italians share a common culture, history, ancestry or language. Legally, all Italian nationals are citizens of the Italian Republic, regardless of ancestry or nation of residence (in effect, however, Italian nationality is largely based on jus sanguinis) and may be distinguished from people of Italian descent without Italian citizenship and from ethnic Italians living in territories adjacent to the Italian Peninsula without Italian citizenship. The majority of Italian nationals are speakers of Italian, or a regional variety thereof. However, many of them also speak another regional or minority language native to Italy. Although there is disagreement on the total number, according to UNESCO there are approximately 30 languages native to Italy (often misleadingly referred to as "Italian dialects").

• Brits look to provoke. The Italians occasionally imagine conversations, though not maliciously. The Germans veer from confrontational to nationalistic.
  • Chris Ballard, "The Reflection, Future and Duality of Post-USMNT Jurgen Klinsmann" (16 May 2018), Sports Illustrated

• [W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
  • Benjamin Franklin, 1751 Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind

• Italians play a certain way, because that’s how they are.
  • Jürgen Klinsmann, as quoted in "The Reflection, Future and Duality of Post-USMNT Jurgen Klinsmann" (16 May 2018), by Chris Ballard, Sports Illustrated

• These people were of all races, colors, and creeds.  French were in the north and in the Carolinas.  Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State.  Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia.  Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia.  Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures.  Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves.  Also they were intermarried with the American Indians.
  • Rose Wilder Lane, §1 of "The Third Attempt," ch. V of Pt. Two of The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (New York: The John Day Company, 1943), pp. 153–154.

• Luciano often gets asked whether he's Italian when traveling overseas with the team and someone hears his accent.

  "No," he will reply. "We are from Rome!"

  • Wright Thompson, "The eternal derby reveals why Italian football finds its way into your blood" (29 September 2018), ESPN

• An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people.
  • Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book IX, Chapter Ten

• Encyclopedic article on Italians on Wikipedia