There is a phrase that this summer entered the collective vocabulary even before becoming a headline: quando torno al mio paese è sempre festa, when I go back to my hometown it is always a celebration. It is the emotional heart of "Al mio paese", the single Serena Brancale wrote with Levante and Delia, released on 3 April 2026 as a track from the album Sacro. Behind its catchy, earworm appeal lies a precise story: that of those who live far from their homeland and return there for the holidays, rediscovering a time and a community that elsewhere seem lost. It is exactly the feeling on which Italy is building one of its most ambitious cultural and economic policies.
"Al mio paese" springs from the meeting of three southern voices: Brancale, from Bari, brings her R&B interwoven with dialect; Levante and Delia come from Sicily with opposite sensibilities, one more narrative, the other more instinctive. The track, written by the three artists with Alessandro La Cava, Federica Abbate and Simone Capurro, produced by Carlo Avarello and Manuel Finotti (Gorbaciof) for Isola degli Artisti / Warner Music Italy, draws generously on the musical traditions of the South: taranta, pizzica, tammuriata, within a radio-friendly, contemporary arrangement.
The result boasts solid numbers. Certified a FIMI gold record at the end of June 2026, the single dominated EarOne's airplay chart for weeks, returning to the top in the heart of the summer season and establishing itself as one of the sonic manifestos of the year. The video, directed by Marco Braia and shot through the streets of Ortigia in Syracuse, stages precisely this return to one's roots as a collective celebration. Brancale herself explained that she conceived it as a piece dedicated to those living away from home, built on images she misses and remembers.
The strength of the track lies entirely in the contrast it declares from the very first lines. On one side, life elsewhere: the nights on the underground, the sense of being a nomad in the crowd, the distance. On the other, the hometown, where the holidays begin the very moment one arrives.
The images that flow through the lyrics compose a liturgy of slowness: the women sitting in front of the house chatting, the ever-crowded squares, the lit festoon lights, the Madonnas in the churches and the patron saints, the white sheets hung out in the wind, the children playing in the middle of the street, the relatives to be visited one by one because otherwise "they take offence". It is a world in which, the song says, there is no rushing. Time is not the kind marked out by urban deadlines, but the dilated time of the festival, of ritual, of relationship.
Here lies the nostalgic core that explains the success: the song does not promise a place, it promises a rhythm. It offers the listener, especially those who have emigrated for study or work, the chance to reconnect, even if only for the length of a song, with a temporality made of belonging rather than productivity. The patron saint's festival, with its fireworks and its stalls, becomes the symbol of an identity that resists uprooting. It is no coincidence that Brancale's tour, the Sacro Tour, after crossing Europe from London, will close in October 2026 precisely in Bari: returning home after the international journey is the very gesture the song narrates.
That nostalgia is not merely a pop feeling. It has become a lever for territorial development with a precise name: roots tourism. The phenomenon concerns Italians residing abroad and people of Italian descent, a potential pool estimated at between 60 and 80 million people worldwide, who return to Italy to rediscover the places of their families.
The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAECI), through the Directorate General for Italians Abroad, has structured the offer within the Italea programme, financed by the PNRR with the support of NextGenerationEU and launched in 2024, proclaimed the "Year of Italian Roots in the World". The name comes from talea, the cutting by which a plant, severed and replanted, grows new roots: the declared metaphor of the return to the "mother plant".
The numbers tell of rapid growth. In 2024, 6.6 million visitors were recorded, up 13.8 per cent on the previous year, for an economic flow of around 5 billion euros, up 34.4 per cent. In 2025, the 7 million presences were surpassed. For 2026, more than 7.4 million travellers are expected, with spending estimated at over 5.5 billion euros; according to the Ministry's assessments, at full capacity the sector could generate an additional flow of up to around 8 billion euros a year.
The programme has involved around 800 municipalities, selected through a dedicated call, which have already organised hundreds of events aimed at Italian communities around the world. The Italea portal recorded over 160 million views in 2025 alone and already counts around 15,000 sign-ups to the ItalEA Card. The regions most sought after by those returning to their family places are Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, Campania, Sicily, Calabria, Abruzzo and Apulia, in large part precisely that South that "Al mio paese" sets to music.
One figure in particular measures the depth of the bond: according to research by The European House - Ambrosetti, the roots tourist stays in Italy for 9.8 days on average, against the 4 to 5 of traditional visits. They do not seek the postcard, they seek the great-grandfather's village, the specific recipe, the hamlet written on a scrap of paper. It is a slow tourism by definition: the same dilated time that the song celebrates.
Song and public programme converge on an identical imagery (the festival, the square, the return, the community), and it is here that the phenomenon becomes interesting, but also debatable. "Al mio paese" sparked controversy precisely on this ground. Several voices in the southern-Italian debate, among them the creator Claudia Fauzia and some commentators from the South's outlets, contested the stereotyped and "exoticising" portrayal of a South reduced to a place of suspension and holidays, a South "that exists only for tourists and those living away for a handful of days a year", emptied of those who live and work there all year round. Others defended the track, recalling that it is signed by three southern artists who tell a real feeling, that of the nostalgia of those who have left.
It is the same tension that runs through roots tourism. The risk of the "postcard" (the picturesque village good for a week in August) is the flip side of its opportunity: to counter depopulation, to spread flows across the year, to support employment in the hospitality and retail of small towns. The difference between folklore for export and real development is made by concrete details: the 9.8 days of stay, the events all year round, the network of emigration museums, the involvement of municipalities as active players and not as backdrop.
Seen this way, "Al mio paese" is not just the hit of the summer. It is the unsolicited but perfect soundtrack of an institutional wager: to turn nostalgia, what some would call melancholy, into a contemporary phenomenon capable of bringing economy, people and future back to the places from which people had departed. The festival that "begins when I go back to my hometown" is the same one the MAECI would like to make, for those villages, a little less seasonal and a little more lasting.
