My first Canada Day in Canada was July 1st, 2019. We were having dinner with other people—music, fireworks, laughter—and what everyone around me was saying in English was almost incomprehensible. Almost like background noise. I sat in the middle of the celebration, smiling, nodding, understanding fragments. I was forty-nine years old. I had a sociology degree, twenty-four years of professional life in Italy, and I could not follow a dinner conversation.
I remember thinking, “This is what it costs.” Not the leaving—I had made peace with the leaving. This. The particular loneliness of being surrounded by joy you cannot fully enter yet.
I had grown up in a village of fewer than a thousand people in Abruzzo. Studied in Urbino, a medieval city so perfectly scaled to the human body that you could walk its entire historic centre in an afternoon. Spent twenty-four years in the industrious Veneto. And then: Toronto. A city of nearly three million people within its boundaries, seven million in its wider reach, where at least 27 languages are spoken natively and the neighbourhood you live in can feel entirely different from the one ten minutes away.
The disorientation was not unfriendliness. Toronto is not unfriendly. The disorientation was scale. And layering. And the particular feeling of knowing that a city has a character — deep, complex, genuinely its own — and not yet being able to read it.
Food was where I felt it most immediately. Not as comparison but as sensation. In Italy, the cuisine moves with the seasons and the soil — tomatoes that taste of sun, olive oil pressed from trees that have been in the same family for generations, bread that smells of the wood-fired oven three streets away. In Toronto, I sat down to a table where the person beside me had brought something from a Jamaican recipe, and the person across from her had made something Ukrainian, and someone else had ordered Vietnamese, and I had cooked Italian — and all of it was present simultaneously, all of it was real, all of it was Toronto. Eating here is not choosing a cuisine. It is making a small journey around the world before you push back your chair.
That was the first thing Canada taught me that Italy couldn’t have: that belonging does not require sameness. That a table can hold many histories at once and still feel like home.
What I did not anticipate — what I am still learning — is the way two countries coexist inside a person. My heart is a perpetual interweaving of Italy and Canada. They live in me simultaneously. When one is fully present, the other becomes an intangible presence alongside it — not absent, never absent, but hovering just at the edge of the moment, coloured by the scents and flavours and sounds of the people and places I carry. The smell of must during the grape harvest in Abruzzo can arrive in the middle of a Toronto October afternoon, unbidden, complete. The particular quality of light on Lake Ontario in early morning has begun, only recently, to feel like mine.
This is what migration actually is, I think — not the crossing of a border but the slow, ongoing work of learning to hold two realities without choosing between them. Not assimilation, which demands erasure. Not nostalgia, which demands stasis. Something harder and more honest than either: integration. The daily act of weaving your roots into a new self without cutting them off at the ground.
Canada Day is the day I sit with both halves honestly. Not to compare. Not to decide which one wins. To understand what each one made me — and what, together, they are still making.
This year, I am writing this in English. It is not yet perfect, and it is also an ongoing journey of growth. Canada Day 2019, I could not follow a dinner conversation.
That distance, measured in years and words, is its own kind of belonging.
As Desmond Tutu said, “I am who I am because of all of us.”
I am who I am because of Abruzzo and Veneto and Urbino and Toronto and every table I have sat at in both languages. I am, still, becoming.
