Dear Tom, if you want to understand how multiple identities — as we westerners mean it — work in general, Europe is definitely the right geographical area on which you need to focus to get a comprehensive answer to your complex question. Moreover, the social legacy of the old continent is particularly enhanced in Italy, a country with a relatively short history of national unity and where the so-called campanilismo, the local sense of identity rooted around the differences among nearby towns or villages, constitutes an unicum in Europe, where instead this feeling usually overlaps with nationalist stances and sometimes flows into independentist or regionalist movements.

On the contrary, in Italy this is a circumscribed reality and a more direct consequence of a traditionally fragmented social framework, while a real identitary political tradition can hardly be found in a few places — mostly islands, not so coincidentally — such as Sardinia, Sicily, Veneto and, to a lesser extent, Naples.