Digital Landlords and Italian Stubbornness
Why we should stop building our businesses on rented digital land
In Silicon Valley, speed is sacred. Scale fast. Automate. Optimize. Move fast and break things. In Italy, we should move differently. We have centuries of experience with landlords who change the rules. Yet somehow we keep trusting digital ones.
I’ve spent over thirty years helping Italian businesses build their digital presence. From the early days of Olivetti PCs to the slow rise of websites in the countryside of Friuli, I’ve seen a pattern: we don’t rush into trends. We don’t surrender our business identity to platforms. Not out of strategy, out of instinct.
Where American startups obsess over reach and followers, many Italian artisans still keep their customer lists in a notebook. Where consultants praise personal branding, Italian shop owners rely on word-of-mouth and decades of presence in the same street. You might laugh. But they’re still there.
Back to Home isn’t nostalgia. It’s a principle: if you don’t control your tools, you don’t control your story. If your business only lives on Instagram, it dies the day the algorithm buries you. If your thoughts only exist on X or Threads, they disappear as soon as someone else buys the platform. If your contacts live in someone else’s CRM, they’re not yours.
Inspired by Marco Camisani Calzolari’s “Fuga da Facebook. The back home strategy.”
In Italy, we’ve always been skeptical of digital landlordism. We may not call it that, we just like things we can touch. We build websites and update them rarely, but we own them. We buy domains with our kids’ names, just in case. We export our emails from Mailchimp “to have a backup, just in case.” It’s not resistance. It’s memory. We’ve seen enough systems crash. We like paper copies.
When Facebook changed its algorithm in 2018, small businesses lost half their reach overnight. Just like that. All their digital investment: gone, unless they paid to get it back. In Italy, that moment reinforced an old instinct: don’t build your house on rented land.
Now, as platform fatigue spreads and digital landlords change the rules every week, that stubborn, analog mindset turns out to be an asset. Slow tech. Local backups. Web presence outside of walled gardens. Not revolutionary, just responsible.
So no, Back to Home is not a retreat. It’s a return to ownership. To treating your digital self like a real house: something you build, maintain, and defend.
Because the future isn’t only about reach. It’s about roots.
I’m the author of Digitalogia, a nonfiction book published in Italy. I’m now working on its upcoming English edition: Digitalosophy — An Italian Perspective on Our Digital Age.
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