For years, the metaphor of a bridge has described relations between Italy and the United States. Before this relationship was economic, it was human, familial, and cultural, built by generations of Italians who crossed the Atlantic carrying traditions, skills, ambitions, and a distinctive sense of belonging. That connection endured. It evolved into an Italian American community that maintained deep ties with its ancestral homeland while becoming part of American society. Their identity, rooted in two countries, has always been both a memory of migration and a resource for the future.
Goods, capital, businesses, technologies, and expertise have also traveled across that bridge. For decades, we understood the relationship mainly as movement between two shores: Italian exports to the American market, US investment in Italy, and the opportunities America offered Italian companies seeking international growth.
Today, I am beginning to believe that this powerful image is no longer enough.
The two shores are becoming less distinct. Economic ties increasingly extend beyond trade and investment toward genuine integration between production systems. Italian companies are establishing a physical presence in America, American businesses are deepening their roots in Italy, and situations are multiplying in which it is difficult to say where one industrial system ends and the other begins.
Recent months have brought intense discussion of tariffs. The return of more aggressive US trade policies has naturally raised concerns in Italy, an export-oriented country whose leading industries depend heavily on the American market.
Yet while the debate centered on the danger of closing markets, the numbers were growing. In 2025, Italian exports to the United States rose 7.2%, reaching approximately €70 billion. During the opening months of 2026, American demand for Italian products also remained strong. This resilience points to foundations deeper than tariff decisions: the quality of Italian products, the appeal of Made in Italy, and the increasing direct participation of Italian businesses in the US economy.
That last development deserves particular attention. If we measure the relationship only through exports, we risk using old categories to describe a transformation already underway.
More Italian companies are doing much more than selling to American customers. They invest, acquire businesses, manufacture products, hire workers, and establish permanent commercial and industrial networks. America is becoming not merely a destination market but an integral part of their growth strategies.
We have already discussed Prysmian and Bending Spoons, whose transactions demonstrate how Italian companies can lead global consolidation. Many less familiar businesses are pursuing similar paths, opening factories, acquiring competitors, creating American subsidiaries, or building supply chains on US soil. This is more than a new export model: it changes the geography of production and the meaning of an Italian business abroad.
The strategic implications are substantial. Tomorrow's Made in Italy may not simply mean products manufactured in Italy and sold in America. It may mean products designed in Italy, made in the United States, financed by international investors, and distributed through value chains permanently connecting both countries.
The same process works in reverse. American investment in Italy has increased significantly in recent years, raising a question that Italians often approach with ambivalence, as though every foreign acquisition necessarily represented a loss of industrial sovereignty.
I believe the central issue is not whether a company is formally Italian or American, but how much value it creates within the economy where it operates.
If a US group invests in an Italian company, preserves and develops its expertise, finances research, opens markets, strengthens employment, and connects it with a larger international network, perhaps the transaction should be viewed not as a loss but as another form of growth.
Likewise, an Italian company acquiring an American business is not merely capturing market share. It may be creating a complex industrial organization capable of combining expertise, talent, and knowledge from both systems.
In recent days, we learned that the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy and the Italy-America Chamber of Commerce in New York have begun discussing closer integration, potentially leading to a truly transatlantic chamber structure.
At first glance, this might sound like an issue for specialists. I see it as a much broader signal: when the way companies operate changes, the institutions supporting them must eventually change as well.
An Italian business expanding into America no longer needs only an export strategy or a distributor. It needs to decide where to locate, how to organize its taxes and corporate structure, how to recruit managers, navigate banking and finance, comply with federal and state regulations, and build relationships with customers, suppliers, and institutions. Above all, it needs to understand a business culture with different rhythms, priorities, and assumptions.
Conversely, American investors entering Italy must learn to recognize industrial value that conventional metrics often miss. The strength of Italian companies may lie not only in their balance sheets but in accumulated expertise, local relationships, entrepreneurial families, manufacturing districts, and the ability to perform highly specialized work that financial models cannot easily capture.
This is precisely what we have worked to do for years at We the Italians. Seeing this vision gain ground reinforces our approach. The most valuable resource in international economic relations is not simply information, which is widely accessible. It is the ability to interpret information: to understand what lies behind a number, why decisions are made, and how risk, growth, capital, ownership, and failure are understood differently across cultures. Most importantly, it is the ability to translate one business culture into another without oversimplifying either.
Here, the Italian American community can play an essential role as an infrastructure of interpretation. Its members can explain to Italian entrepreneurs why decisions in the United States often have to be made faster, why capital is deployed with a greater tolerance for risk, and why failure is considered less final. At the same time, they can help American investors understand why personal relationships, family histories, and ties to a particular place can carry far more economic weight in Italy than a standard financial analysis suggests.
The Made in Italy of the future may be a technology developed in Italy and manufactured in Texas; an American company owned by an Italian group; a US research center working with an Italian small or medium-sized business; a Boston investment fund backing a company in Veneto; or an Italian American executive leading the US expansion of a business from Emilia.
At that point, speaking merely of exports and foreign investment will seem inadequate. What will be taking shape is a shared economic system in which capital, businesses, people, and knowledge move in both directions, and national identities survive within an increasingly dense network of interdependence.
I strongly believe that the bridge metaphor now needs a companion image: not simply two shores linked together, but a shared space where Italy and the United States build a deeper, more stable economic relationship precisely when much of the world is rediscovering borders, protectionism, and confrontation.
That may sound paradoxical. Perhaps it is exactly the opposite. At a time when everyone is defending their own shores, the real strength of the Italy-US relationship may lie not in retreating to opposite banks, but in bringing those banks ever closer together.
