At first glance, ITALIC may appear to belong to the same category as other business-oriented publications. It deals with professionals, with companies, with the way work is structured across different environments. The difference is not in the subject, but in the level at which that subject is examined.

Most business media operates on a layer that is imm…

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Not everyone who has worked outside Italy has something to contribute to a publication like this. Experience, on its own, is not a sufficient condition. What matters is not having left, but having operated long enough in a different system to recognise that the initial assumptions you carried with you were only partially valid, and that adjusting them r…

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There is a common assumption that working across countries is primarily a matter of language, as if translation were a technical issue that can be resolved through fluency. In practice, what gets lost is rarely linguistic. It is structural, and it concerns the way meaning is produced within a given context.

Every system relies on a set of implicit refere…

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One of the least visible shifts that happens when you start operating outside Italy concerns the way decisions are made. Not the outcome, not even the speed in the obvious sense, but the underlying structure that determines how a decision comes into existence, how it is validated, and what happens once it is implemented.

Within a familiar system, decisio…

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There is a tendency, when talking about Italians working outside Italy, to start from the moment of departure, as if the act of leaving were the most relevant part of the story. It rarely is. What matters, and what tends to remain largely unobserved, is what happens afterwards: the slow, often invisible process through which habits, assumptions, and way…

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A text published on ITALIC should begin from a concrete observation, not from a position to be defended. This distinction is more important than it may seem. Starting from a position tends to produce predictable arguments, often aligned with existing narratives. Starting from an observation, especially one that is not immediately resolved, creates space…

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There is a reason this is called ITALIC.

In English, “italic” suggests something slanted, slightly off the main line. A deviation from the standard. Something that doesn’t sit perfectly aligned with everything else.

That is the expectation.

And that is precisely where we start to diverge.

Because what we are trying to describe here - the way Italian profess…

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