Anthony Castelvecchi has turned a search for purpose into a project connecting Italian descendants across continents. In an interview published by Appetito magazine on August 6, 2026, the founder of ORIUNDI explains why the global Italian diaspora deserves broader, more nuanced representation.
After leaving the corporate world, Castelvecchi created ORIUNDI to document communities often excluded from familiar narratives centered on Italy and major Italian American strongholds such as New York, New Jersey, and Chicago.
The platform’s name comes from “oriundi,” a term describing people of Italian descent born outside Italy. For Castelvecchi, however, it carries a wider meaning – a shared identity capable of embracing the many Italian cultures developed around the world.
His travels have shown how migration preserves traditions while transforming them. New Orleans made a particularly strong impression during its St. Joseph’s Day celebrations. Castelvecchi found generations-old Sicilian customs and a community whose influence extends through the city’s food, agriculture, music, and architecture, even though many visitors overlook that Italian American contribution.
Food provides one of the clearest links between history and identity. Drawing on his Chicago roots, Castelvecchi highlights the Italian beef sandwich. It developed among working-class Italian immigrants employed in meatpacking plants, who brought home inexpensive cuts, seasoned them with garlic, onion, and oregano, and slow-cooked the meat until tender. Served with sweet peppers and hot giardiniera, the sandwich became a distinctly Chicago expression of Italian resourcefulness.
Southern Brazil offers another striking example. In rural communities shaped by immigration from Veneto, Lombardy, and Trentino, traditions have survived for more than a century. Polenta, Catholic practices, Venetian language, and winemaking remain visible, while Italian customs have blended with Brazilian rural life. Castelvecchi sees connections between southern Brazil and Veneto, New York City and Napoli, and Toronto and Calabria.
That diversity challenges the idea that Italians or their descendants form a single uniform culture. Italian identity can adapt, merge with local customs, or preserve practices that have disappeared elsewhere. Castelvecchi believes these differences should strengthen, rather than fragment, the diaspora.
For people beginning their own reconnection, he recommends 3 practical steps: question relatives and research family history online, learn standard Italian, and celebrate heritage alongside others. Language, he argues, opens both ancestral towns and contemporary Italy.
His lesson is that heritage does not survive through nostalgia alone. It remains meaningful when descendants study its origins, understand the experiences of immigrants, and engage with Italy as a country. ORIUNDI therefore combines storytelling, travel, language, and food to create connections between generations that may live thousands of miles apart but still recognize elements of a common past.
Over the next 5 years, Castelvecchi intends to visit additional communities in the United States and abroad. His plans include a book based on his research and travels, a streaming series devoted to diaspora food, and ORIUNDI’s development into a lifestyle brand with its own products. The mission remains consistent – uncover overlooked histories, connect scattered communities, and give the worldwide Italian diaspora a platform broad enough to reflect its true complexity.
