There is this nice little place in Brussels where all Italians come together. Many are young and bright expats, fed up with their youth-unfriendly country, yet nostalgic and with a touching Italianness. Piola.Libri is a library-wine-bar, it is THE Italian library in Brussels, and clearly a lovely cultural space. Probably it is just too small to host its wide population of fans and friends, but perhaps it is rather the numbers to be blamed. Italians are historically a folk of migrants and in Belgium they represent one of the biggest communities. La petite Italie is actually not so petite. The known fact is that Italians are everywhere, they really are, but I'm dazed by the fact that since I'm here in Brussels I've spoken much more Italian than in the last three years I've spent abroad and travelling around. And that happens also when my interlocutor is not Italian. Here I've so far found French, Polish, Germans, Dutch, British and Romanians all more than happy to practice their Italian with me. I think they are all way too fluent!
For an Italian it really isn't challenging to live in Brussels. I'd say it's rather more challanging for a Dutch. They experience a cultural schock whenever something doesn't work as expected. Italians have clearly different standards as they are already used to a place where things do NOT work, or actually work much worse. Sometimes, Brussels feels like a piece of Mediterranean, chaotic, mixed, diverse, and bureaucratically confused, but then with a heavy weather and the stiff northern way of relating to other people in general. Not that this really counts, because the Brussels we live in is an international bubble, where no many Bruxellois/Brusselaars are left.
This said, few days ago we went to Berlin and were surprised to find a sort of Little Italy there as well. Around the world, big little Italies can be found almost anywhere in the USA, then in Cananda, in São Paulo, in the UK and in Ireland...., and if I don't know of any Little Italy in China, Vietnam, Japan or Tanzania is just because, in case, I prefer to be left with the surprise!
