The bit of Venezuela that sprouted on the Mediterranean

All three suggest I could be in Venezuela. Except I’m not. I’m in the Mediterranean, in a small waterfront town called Marina di Camerota, tucked into the southern Italian region of Campania.

The first time I came here from Venezuela was more than a decade ago. I was visiting my aunt in southern Italy and she insisted on taking us to Marina. She wanted us to see the scattered references to Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, that were all around. This was the winter of 2012, years before an increasingly autocratic government and an economic crisis would force 8 million people to leave Venezuela. Seeing traces of home in a small village somewhere in Europe felt fun back then — an odd curiosity. Not the familiar pattern it would later become.

Though a secret to much of the world, Marina di Camerota, with about 3,000 residents, is locally known for being shaped — almost built — by Italians who migrated to Venezuela and later returned. Much of its development came from the money they earned during Venezuela’s oil-boom years, and nearly everyone there has some connection to Caracas.

By my second visit to Marina, in 2024, the Venezuela I had left behind was very different: crisis, repression and migration dominated the headlines. In early January came the extraordinary news of U.S. forces attacking Caracas in the middle of the night and extracting Nicolás Maduro and his wife. In Marina, like elsewhere around the world, his ousting set off both glee that he was gone and trepidation about the government left behind.

Venezuela has an enormous diaspora scattered in various countries, and seeing a town full of Venezuelans wasn’t an odd thing anymore. But the topic of Marina came up a couple of years ago during a conversation with a friend. He had been there recently and gave me the number of a Venezuelan Italian man, Domingo Bagnati, who offered to rent me a room and introduce me to his Venezuelan friends.

Getting to Marina is not easy. After taking a four-hour train ride from Rome to Palinuro station, you need to find a car to take you the rest of the way. Bagnati’s son picked me up and drove for half an hour through curvy mountain roads, the sea appearing in flashes between the hills. In Venezuela, marinaros, as people from Marina are known, found the colors and weather in La Guaira, a city near Caracas, that reminded them of Salerno, the province that includes Marina.

When you enter Bagnati’s home, the first thing you notice is his garden. Green nets stretch beneath the olive trees, to pick up the fruit that falls when autumn arrives. In a corner, a bit out of place, is a mango tree he brought from Venezuela in the 1990s. It never produces mangoes, but it stands among the olive trees as a reminder of the old life he once built across the ocean. Inside his home, a large poster of Bolívar hangs among the family photographs. The faces of his children, all of whom left Venezuela, surround it.

Though Venezuela is associated with one of the biggest migrations in modern history, for many decades it was the other way around. In Marina, the connection to Venezuela goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, when local fishermen heard of a faraway land of opportunity. Bagnati’s grandparents started visiting Caracas in the 1920s.

In the 1950s, Europeans, primarily from Italy, Spain and Portugal, migrated in waves to Venezuela, lured by the possibilities in an oil-rich paradise as their countries still faced hardships after World War II. By 2017, more than 2 million Venezuelans were estimated to be descendants of Italians.

Bagnati often gathers with a group of men who, like him, switch among Italian, Spanish and the slang of Caracas and Salerno. One afternoon, while sipping coffee, they pulled out a photograph from 1969: a soccer team, “Los Leones de Marina,” the “Lions of Marina,” taken in Venezuela. All 15 players were born in Marina di Camerota, he said, and were living in Caracas at the time, where most families from the Italian village worked in grocery stores and hung out together.

Of the 15, nine eventually returned to Marina. Others died. None were in Venezuela today.

In Marina di Camerota, I am reminded of the cyclical nature of human movement and its influence in shaping collective identities. Though migration is often framed as a threat in today’s political discourse, movement across borders has always existed. The people I encountered managed to build a life somewhere else, and when they went back home, it felt like migrating again.

“I never quite found my space in either place,” said Bruno D’Andrea, who lived back and forth between Italy and Venezuela for decades, until he stayed permanently in Marina in the 1980s.

Pietro Cusati, a friend of D’Andrea’s, was similarly torn. “I suffered this hybrid identity,” he said. “The love I have for Venezuela is infinite, so when I was there, I was Venezuelan. But now I am here, and I am Italian.”

They told me a story I could never ask my grandfather — he died before I was born — and I listened as if I were hearing my own family history.

Giuseppe Troccoli, 84, recalling his first time traveling to Caracas, as a child, said: “The boat broke down at sea. We were adrift for five days. The whole trip was 18 days.”

I met him on a Sunday afternoon during a family gathering. At the table, there was a familiar mix of languages and accents, as guests pulled out family albums. I recognized my old school, an Italian educational center in Caracas, where many descendants of Italians studied.

Troccoli’s daughter, María Troccoli, flipped through the pages of photos naming alleys and people they had left behind. “I never learned to swim because our whole life was about working,” she said. Even today, she never goes into deep water.

But for many, hard work paid off. Troccoli built his home overlooking the sea, which today is a hotel. “This house, like all of the houses in Marina di Camerota, was completely built with Venezuelan money,” he told me. It is a sentence many in the village repeat.

It is not surprising that marinaros felt at home in Venezuela: The warm weather and the sunset light can confuse the senses. That, along with the prosperity of the oil-boom era, kept them there for decades. In the middle of the 1980s, however, life in the country took a dark turn: Increasing crime rates, political tension and the collapse of the local currency marked the end of the so-called golden years in Venezuela. Many Italian migrants started to go back home. The Troccolis said they were robbed eight times in a single year, 1984. They returned to Marina and never went back.

“I regret every day not going back to Venezuela,” Troccoli said. “Now I’m too old to do it. I’m Italian because this is where I was born, but my patria — my homeland — is Venezuela. That’s where I spent my best days.”

In recent years, Marina di Camerota has received a new generation of Venezuelans. Most had been pushed out by the increasingly hostile conditions in their homeland.

Dailyn Roo, who married Bagnati’s son Angel, moved to Marina in 2021. She couldn’t find much online about the town, so when she encountered the quiet winters spent mostly indoors, she felt out of place. “I imagined something else,” she said. “This is not La Guaira,” referring to the town outside Caracas.

Roo now works at Guacamaya, the family’s Venezuelan restaurant, making arepas and pabellón criollo, two Venezuelan specialties, for the summer crowds.

Her son, Andrés, offered to take me back to the train station, after my last visit to Marina last September. It was the last week of summer, and the beaches had started emptying out. As we drove through the hills, I took one last glimpse at the blue waters off Salerno, the same horizon my grandparents chased in other lands. We passed yet another Venezuelan flag.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.