Tell us a little about yourself, where do you come from and how long ago did you leave Italy?
I'm Luca, and I'm from Ferrara. Together with my wife Paola, who is also from Ferrara, we left Italy on September 30, 2006, in a camper with our eight cats.
What brought you to the Isle of Wight in England?
I came here for professional reasons. I worked for eight years in a research centre in Bologna, where I had always had annual contract renewals. But I was looking to boost my CV. I found the opportunity to take a 4-year Microsoft course (in a similar company to the one I was working for in Italy). This would have got me a prestigious Certificate (since it would be in English). So we moved with the idea of returning to Italy in four or five years at the latest after achieving something.
And then we all know what happened. There was the 2008 economic crisis, and the school system here was reorganised. The promised job was gone too. The British are such. They promise you a contract but keep you on probation for six months until one day you're dismissed. So I was jobless for a while, and then I landed an IT job in a middle school. I worked there for two years.
Did you find it hard to adapt there? How did you overcome all these challenges?
Sure, we were expecting troubles, but not this way. We met a couple who lived here and who helped us find a pet-friendly home (since we have cats). They told us that to find a job here we needed contacts, so we got in touch with people for references. I was hoping to find a similar job to the one I had in Italy. We had been here several times before, but a few days after the move, we learned that the house we were renting had been declared "unsuitable" three years earlier. In short, we had been scammed.
Luckily, we met a very kind Council employee who helped us solve our bureaucratic issues. We found a nice suitable home, and I found a job after a few months at a Middle School that also offered me a training course.
In which field are you working currently? Did the pandemic have an impact on your job?
The middle school closed in 2010. Some of the non-teaching staff was redeployed, and the rest went on early retirement. I sent hundreds of job application in the IT failed, but with no success. I wasn't even called for an interview, perhaps because I had no local references. They don't quite trust foreigners here.
Since 2010, I have been dealing with highways and parking for the Council, thanks to references from the Dean of the Middle School (he now lives in Australia).
During the pandemic, staff from our department have been redeployed to deliver food, medicine and COVID-19 tests. We were also hired for night shifts at the LFT rapid test centres throughout February and March. But now we've returned to almost normal.
From a career point of view, what has England given you more than Italy?
From a career point of view, it gave me the opportunity to have a steady job. But honestly, there's no such thing as a career here. We tend to do our bend and never quit a job suddenly as the locals do, especially the younger generation. Yet, we always have to start from scratch. We always ask ourselves how some people made it elsewhere. Our sad reality in the South of the UK is that there are very few prospects for Europeans.
How do you spend your free time given the current restrictions?
We like to walk, go to the beach with our dogs (having a dog is a status here, it means that you are friendly. It's like you must be a good person if you have a dog.
In your opinion, what are the pros and cons of living abroad?
The pros: banking and the internet are easily accessible. Everything works wonderfully, and bureaucracy is quite simple. It takes just a couple of days to get an answer.
The cons: We don't have a strong Italian community here. Italians tend to boast in public that they are delighted with everything, but they share their problems and difficulties in private. Poles, Russians and the people from Eastern Europe, on the other hand, have a very strong community. They can rely on each other to find a home, a job, and even to find a school for their children.
We then learned that the governments of the Eastern countries have agreements with the UK government. So you will never see a Pole accepting less than a Briton for a similar job as the contracts are regular and legal. Italians are offered less important and poorly paid jobs. Very often, we're offered less than the legal minimum wage, but we have never known or heard of Eastern Europeans in positions of prestige, neither public nor private. We had the opportunity to meet Indians with excellent professional backgrounds, though.
We hope that Europe will remember us and develop plans for the return of the Italians who wish to. We feel very sorry that the Italian Government does not communicate with us expats, except when it comes to voting. For example, we were not informed that our tax codes were no longer valid. We don't have a health card anymore, and there's no news of the SPID! Yet many of us need to communicate with Italian public administrations! So we have to rely on the internet, which fortunately always works very well here.
It is impossible to communicate with the British in the South on many subjects. It seems like they have no idea of what's happening elsewhere. We have met many Brits who travel the world, but the truth is that they never really leave their roots. They vote for Brexit, but now they complain that Europeans are coming to pick tomatoes and strawberries.
They vote for Brexit and stand up for French fishers to cross over. Since the Brexit, they're thinking of getting everything from Canada, nurses from China and other Asian countries, etc. Prices of products imported from Europe have gone up.
They also believe that Europe has raised postal rates to put them on purpose. Actually, extra European rates are higher, and this was a very predictable consequence of Brexit. Another difficulty is that public information (via newspapers, TV and radio) is extremely vague and superficial. They talk about Brexit and then Covid. Luckily there is the internet. Otherwise, we would not have understood anything!
Are you looking to leave the Isle of Wight?
Yes, because here we feel like "guests" of people who think they are the luckiest people in the world. They feel that all the other people around them are stupid. Even the kids at the middle school where I worked have this belief! We want to return to Europe. We're actually waiting for the pandemic to come to an end. It's a pity that Italy appears so confused and at the mercy of other countries' decision. But we haven't yet decided where we will go.
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