Uploaded January 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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What do you think of when you think of an Italian family? Is it a large group of people, smiling around a table, ready to eat a home cooked meal?
The definition of the word family changes depending on who, when and where you ask... but across cultures there are some similarities. Farms were the first step towards modern civilization wherever so there’s a historical starting point we share: the large extended family. Extended families, with multiple generations in one space, complimented the agricultural economies which made up and still make up most of the world. Then we saw that as societies industrialized, influenced by religion and political ideology, they began moving away from large extended families to a much more compact nuclear one. The nuclear family would be the defacto familial structure for a few decades before morning into what we have today which is a lot more elusive.

Italy was no exception to this timeline even though it did have it’s own speed and Italian twist before arriving to what we’re still trying to define today. In this episode of Unpacked, we’re talking about the evolution of the Italian family, why the reality is probably different than the image that you have in your mind, and what it means for the future.


C O N N E C T W I T H M E
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