Demography of race and ethnicity in Italy

Italy is among the countries with a “colour-blind” approach: during Fascism, the 1938 race Italian legislation, openly discriminated against Jews and Roma. In the post-WWII period, discourses about race and ethnicity (“razza” in Italian) became a taboo. Nevertheless, race is mentioned in Article 3 of the Italian Constitution, where equality of citizens is stated. The Italian Constitution, not only guarantees equality of citizens but also establishes a “positive clause” (Article 3.2) in order to “remove those obstacles of economic or social nature which constrain the freedom of equality of citizens”. In addition, Article 6 recognizes and protects historic linguistic minorities. The term ethnic is therefore not used in the Constitution for the obvious above-mentioned reasons. According to the last population Census, the most numerous are the “Sardo”, a language spoken for the most part by inhabitants of the Sardinia islands (over one million), the “German” (about 350,000), the “Slovenian” (about 60,000) and the “French” (about 70,000). Ethno-racial statistics are not permitted in Italy, apart from the specific case of those historic ethno-linguistic minorities guaranteed by the Constitution and law. Therefore, in the Italian census, race and ethnicity are identified with proxies: citizenship, place of birth, former citizenship for Italians and citizenship of parents (the latter since the last Census of 2011). Data on religion and language is not collected in the Census. The only exception is data on language of ethno-linguistic historical minorities.