Among the Instagram characters created by the Italian comedian Giorgia Fumo, the one that resonates the most with me is a millennial travel influencer called Emily, who “explains” Italy in her videos, letting her audience in on gems such as: “Did you know that Europe is not a country – it’s mind-blowing – but Italy, listen to me, is a country! Italians walk to places! They walk to enjoy fresh air! Do you know Italians cook their own meals, like, every day? In Italy nobody works because everyone is rich and everyone just has these huge family mansions in Tuscany or Napoli?”
If Fumo’s satirical creation sounds like too much of an exaggeration, consider that her inspirational source materials include a Las Vegas-based creator called Ciaoamberc, who in one earnest post that amassed 3.6m views said: “Do you ever notice how everybody in Italy does not have a therapist like everybody in the United States does? […] We used to live in communities, we’d talk to people every day. There are people in Italy who sit down for an hour to have an espresso. We don’t do any of that.”
Emily the travel influencer unwittingly anticipated the latest twist for the Netflix hit Emily in Paris, namely the lead character’s departure from Paris to Rome, which is reportedly causing some grief for France’s president, Emmanuel Macron.
Some Italian millennials, like me, try to correct the many misguided assumptions about Italy by commenting under incriminating TikToks or Substack posts. In May, a Substacker stated that “Italy will cure you from the disease of worrying about your net worth”. When I told them that Italy’s economy was not doing too well, they replied that the country teaches you other priorities. Must be nice.
My compatriots are depicted as beautiful and elegant zoo animals who, while always “simple”, possess an innate wisdom, much like Virgil’s shepherds in the Eclogues. In the Emily universe, we had already got a taste of that at the tail end of season 4. The brief sojourn in Rome, which will be a more prominent part of season 5, regaled us with borderline delphic truths about Italy, such as “People [in Italy] are really warm” and “everybody sits down like a family to eat a delicious lunch”.
“Cliches exist for a reason,” says the character Marcello, Emily’s new love interest. Of course, he is the scion of the in-universe equivalent of Brunello Cucinelli and is dressed the way GQ or all those US menswear accounts imagine an average Italian man dresses.
I am sure that, in season 5, Emily (played by Lily Collins) will effortlessly chaperone centuries-old fashion, art and lifestyle institutions into the 21st century; she’ll spotlight the best of Milan design week while also enjoying blissfully empty thermal baths in Tuscany, an empty beach at Fiordo di Furore and sprawling ski slopes in the Dolomites. Her colleagues, all dark-haired, tanned and with voluminous curls, will teach her the art of dolce far niente, and she’ll regale us with cooking classes where the act of making pasta is both tender yet, weirdly, sensuous. Add a savant nonna too.
If her universe were true to life in Italy, Emily, who is a marketing exec would face boomer clients who think that a 30-year-old is still “too young” to have any meaningful professional opinion; she’d meet millennial peers who struggle to find decent employment options (especially in the creative industries), who’d balk at and actually resent this character who just waltzed in without an iota of understanding of the local culture and market, naturally commanding authority.
She’d witness a culture where therapy is only barely losing its stigma; she’d deal with a bureaucratic apparatus that is perhaps less efficient than its French and notoriously sluggish German counterparts. She would not listen to the aria “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma, while engaging in a mukbang session in the middle of the day: most likely, she’d hear Sesso e Samba by Tony Effe blasted far and wide; she’d learn a bestemmia (profanity) or two. On a darker note, she might end up in the middle of a neo-fascist rally disguised as a Lord of the Rings-themed event. Overall, she’d live in a country that still abides by what 19th-century author Giovanni Verga called the ideal of the oyster (you’re better off clinging to the rock you grew up on like a mollusc, lest you get eaten by the dangerous “fish” of innovation).
Hey, I am not above being seduced by the sheer beauty of the main signifiers of la dolce vita: I only learned to appreciate the cultural offerings of my home country once I emigrated. I have often lucked out: a mini-moon in the Tuscan town of Bagno Vignoni in 2022 resulted in my having the thermal pools all to myself; going to Rome in January 2020 meant I could just show up at the Scuderie del Quirinale and see a show about Canova without booking it.
Yet, last time I partook, I paid the price. Earlier this month, my husband and I thought we had outsmarted the tourist hordes by deciding to head to the Amalfi coast in early October. After being repeatedly stuck behind gargantuan coaches along the torturous single-lane road that connects the local towns, we eventually made it to Positano, our hearts no longer really in it.
We might as well have ended up on Main Street USA at Disneyland. People proceeded at a snail’s pace, either filming content or looking at every single storefront window featuring souvenirs, homeware and clothing which, in lieu of Disneyland’s signature castle and mouse ears, displayed lemons glowing like orbs or semi-abstract ceramic-tile motifs. I don’t want to be a total curmudgeon, though. I do think that the B-roll showcasing the French and Italian landscapes seen in Emily in Paris is nothing short of gorgeous.
No matter which parts of Europe Emily ends up in during seasons to come, I do strongly hope that she will get to “stamp her passport” with many more international lovers, as Mindy, Emily’s first friend in Paris, puts it. May she date Sergio from Madrid, Hans from Berlin, Andrzej from Warsaw, János from Budapest and Sandu from Bucharest. Indeed, if the findings of France’s National Centre for Cinema and Animation (CNC), which reported that 38% of tourists cited the series among their reasons for visiting Paris, are accurate, Emily’s many future romps around the continent can act like the rising tide that lifts all of Europe’s proverbial boats. Europe, be prepared for an influx of Emilys to come.
Angelica Frey is a writer, editor, and researcher from Milan living in Boston. She is the co-author of the Italian Disco Stories newsletter
