Ellis Island and NYC skyline
Once upon a time, Italians boarded ships to America with a suitcase, a few lire and a lot of hope. Today, plenty of Americans are doing the exact opposite: they arrive in Italy with a suitcase, a vague plan and an overwhelming appetite for pasta! Some of them even end up running the Italian wine world!
When the boats went the other way
Between 1880 and 1920, more than four million Italians migrated to the United States. The Library of Congress notes that by 1920 they made up more than 10 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population. Over two million of them arrived in the 1900s alone.
Wine travelled with them. Take John Gemello, who left Piedmont for California in 1912 as a trained winemaker, only to run headfirst into Prohibition. His great-grandson tells the story, and it’s a reminder that Italian families helped build American wine (see Ep. 2691 of the Italian Wine Podcast). Barbara Fitzgerald, who hosts the Italian Wine Podcast’s Masterclass US Wine Market series, comes from a fourth-generation Italian-American family of California wine pioneers.
Photo Credit: Personal archives of Barbara Fitzgerald IWA
And then the tide turned
Fast forward a century and the traffic has turned around. ISTAT counts 17,650 US citizens as legally resident in Italy at the start of 2025, up 6.7 percent in a year and more than 2,000 higher than in 2020. That makes Americans Italy’s second-largest English-speaking community after the British. They’re also not all in Rome and Milan: nearly half live in Lazio, Lombardy and Tuscany, but the report notes they’re spreading into more unexpected corners of the country.
Today they come for the language, the food, the history and the lifestyle, and a surprising number stay for the wine.
The push and the pull
Italy has always had its charms, but the push from the other side of the Atlantic looks stronger than it has in years. A Gallup poll found that about one in five Americans would like to leave the US permanently, roughly double the share a decade ago. Gallup tracking shows 10 to 11 percent wanting to emigrate under the Bush and Obama administrations. A Harris Poll of more than 6,300 adults, run between August 2024 and February 2025, found that 42 percent had considered or planned to relocate abroad. And it isn’t all talk: an estimated 180,000 Americans moved abroad in 2025, according to Census Bureau data cited in the same report from The National.
The reasons are a mix of healthcare costs, housing and the political climate, which respondents to one post-election survey cited as a factor. Daydreaming and packing are different things, and most people who say they’re tempted won’t actually leave. Still, the mood has shifted.
Italy sits at the centre of this in one particular way. Until March 2025, anyone with an Italian ancestor alive after 1861 could apply for citizenship by descent. The Tajani Decree restricted that to people with an Italian-born parent or grandparent, and Italy’s Constitutional Court upheld the change in March 2026. Italy’s foreign ministry estimated that 60 to 80 million people worldwide were eligible under the old rules. Of the roughly 16 million Americans who report Italian ancestry, only about 333,000 are registered Italian citizens.
So these days the route to Italy usually runs through work, study or love rather than a family tree, which is exactly how our next few characters got here.
The sailor who couldn’t leave
Meet Joseph Walker in Ep. 2810, where Richard Hough talks to the author of Buried Italy. The US military sent Joseph to Italy in 1988. He studied history in Naples, went home to finish his Master’s, and by 1994 was back with, as the podcast puts it, absolutely no plans to leave. Over thirty years he has guided more than 3,000 groups, and he was the first person to take international travellers underwater to the sunken Roman ruins of Portus Julius. The BBC, the History Channel and Discovery have all called on his expertise.
He isn’t a winemaker, but the episode explores why wine matters so much to the visitor experience and what a glass can tell you about Italy’s past. Anyone who has stood in a ruin at sunset with a bottle of something local knows the answer: the history tastes better with wine.
The Portus Julius
Photo Credit: Parco Sommerso di Baia
The sommelier who planned one harvest
Wayne Young’s story is the classic “just one harvest” tale. In Ep. 1264, he introduces himself as a transplanted American in Friuli Venezia Giulia since 1998. He’d done a WSET Diploma, worked for Wine Spectator and served as a sommelier at Joe Bastianich’s Becco in New York. The plan was a harvest in the cellar, then back to Manhattan. Three months became four years, he married his Italian girlfriend, and in 2002 he moved to Udine for good.
In that episode he interviews Marko Primosic, the winemaker known in the United States as “Mr. Ribolla Gialla” for introducing an obscure Friulian grape to American drinkers. It’s a pleasing circle: an American who made Friuli home, talking to the Friulian who made Friuli famous in America.
The woman who built the megaphone
The Italian Wine Podcast even has its own version of the story. Stevie Kim was born in Korea and raised in the United States, settled in Verona, earned an MBA at Bocconi, and became Managing Director of Vinitaly International. In 2017 she launched the first podcast in English dedicated entirely to Italian wine, and it now publishes a new episode every day. She regularly features in Italian wine power lists.
The old guard
None of this is new. Writer Burton Anderson quit his job as news editor at the International Herald Tribune in 1977 and moved to Tuscany to write about Italian wine and food. His books helped English-speaking readers discover Italy’s vineyards, and he was inducted into the Wines of Italy Hall of Fame in 2009. Wine Enthusiast’s Italian editor Kerin O’Keefe moved to Italy in 1991 and went on to write an award-winning book on Franco Biondi Santi.
Why it works
Maybe it’s the fresh eyes. Outsiders see what locals stop noticing, whether that’s a village, a grape, or a Sunday lunch that lasts five hours. Maybe it’s the bridge to the American market, which the Masterclass US Wine Market series, such as Ep. 2699, explores in depth. Or maybe it’s just that Italy is hard to leave once you’ve sat at the right table and drank the right wine.
Full circle
A century ago, Italians crossed the ocean and brought their wine with them. Now Americans are crossing back, bringing their curiosity, their stories and their very loud enthusiasm for aperitivo. Each has enriched wine on both sides of the Atlantic.
So, next time you press play on an episode, listen for the accent. Chances are the person behind the microphone came for a few months, and stayed for a long time! Cin cin to them.
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