photo by Donato Miranda
Have you ever wondered what it would really be like to move to another country? Most Americans don’t have a clear picture of what that experience would be like, as they live far from an international border. In this interview, I talk with someone who made the leap to see how he did it.
Donato Miranda is an American who moved to Italy more than four years ago. He continues to work for a US company remotely. However, he doesn’t think of himself as an expatriate, but rather a “repatriate,” as his parents were born in Italy. Donato’s outlook will be interesting to not only subscribers considering moving abroad, but anyone who is interested in Italian culture.
This piece was originally featured in the August 2009 issue of Global Asset Strategist.
Jennifer Barry: Thanks for agreeing to speak with me about your experiences. So why did you move to Italy?
Donato Miranda: My parents are Italian and I’ve always wanted to live here. I was born in the States, but I always used to go back when I was a kid, visiting my grandparents. As a kid I didn’t appreciate it. Then during college, I went to WPI, and I went to their project center in Venice. I was 20 years old, and that’s when I fell in love with Italy. I had a month’s experience in Venice, and from that experience I wanted to learn the language and live here.
JB: So your parents were Italian but you didn’t really speak Italian?
DM: Well they spoke a dialect of Italian in the house, it’s like a different language basically.
JB: Oh, because of all the different nation-states?
DM: Yes, Italy wasn’t really a county until a hundred and something years ago. If I were to speak the way my parents speak, no one would understand me here. It wasn’t a spoken language for me either. When they spoke to me in this dialect, I understood it but I would respond to them in English. So I don’t speak the dialect technically, I just understand it.
I wanted to learn mainstream Italian and live here since college, but I didn’t frankly have the guts to do it. I got a job in Boston after college and I just didn’t do it. Over the years, the desire to move would come back periodically. I’d feel bad for a while that I wasn’t doing it.
Finally, five years ago I seriously started the process on the road to getting here, I told myself if I don’t do this I’m going to die inside basically. I’m not doing what I want to do with my life.
JB: So you thought, “Why am I putting this off?”
DM: Yeah, follow my dream or be depressed for the rest of my life basically. So I got my Italian passport while I lived in Boston because I knew that I could.
JB: Because of your parents?
DM: When I was born, my father was not an American citizen. So it was a question of going to the Italian consulate, giving them all the documents they wanted to see, and I was an Italian citizen. Well, a dual citizen. I kept my American passport.
JB: A lot of people think you can’t do that, by the way.
DM: It depends on the country. I know Austria won’t let you do it. I know a girl with Austrian parents with American citizenship who wanted dual passports. They told her either you become Austrian or you remain American, not both. Italy lets you do it, Ireland lets you do it. So that’s what I did.
As far as my job goes, I never really changed jobs, I was always working for the same software company even though many changes happened over the years. One of the changes being that we got really small, from 200 people down to 15 or 10 maybe. It took no convincing my boss to move my job here. In fact, I bought a one way ticket to Rome, and three months before the flight, I said to my boss, “I’m moving to Rome. If you guys are into it, I’m willing to keep working for you there.”
JB: (laughs) So it was a fait accompli. You told them you were leaving.
DM: Yes, my boss said it was okay, and I’m still working for them.
You can read the second part of this interview here.
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I think the previous comment is true, it really is massive dissatisfaction that prompts people to make changes. The really weird part is how hard it is for people to realize they are massively dissatisfied! So many people go through life thinking “Well, something is wrong here, but everyone else seems to think it’s ok, so it must be me.” If you hate where you’re at or what you’re doing, recognize that. And then take action to fix it!
As the person who did the interview, I can tell you there was a palpable despair when Donato talked about wanting to move and then not doing anything – for years.
I agree that people make few changes when they are happy or mostly satisfied. I think people are in denial about how unhappy they are because if they admitted it, they would have to act. I know I was dissatisfied with my job and my home for a long time before I made a radical change. I kept thinking a couple tweaks would do it, but that wasn’t sufficient.
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We would like to go to Italy in 2013, I really enjoy reading about it, People and Places in Italy are truly fascinating
Hi Jeremy, I’ve heard very good things about Italy. I want to visit soon myself!