Italian cuisine is without a doubt one of this country's biggest international calling cards and some 60,000 Italian restaurants abroad currently rake in some 27 billion euros a year in turnover from more than a million customers, according to a new study.
In Germany alone, the report said, Italian immigrants controlled 38,000 companies, most of them in the food sector.
And they hold a virtual monopoly on Germany's 2,500 ice cream shops.
The only downside, the report pointed out, was that second and third generation Italians abroad appear to be reluctant to carry on the family business. In Germany, for example, only two thirds of the Italian restaurants are still owned and operated by Italians, while in South Korea only eight out of that country's 600 Italian restaurants are run by Italians.
Ice-cream shop operators in Germany have apparently found a solution to this problem by replacing their unwilling offspring in the shop with those of Italian immigrants from Argentina and Brazil, the study found. The report was put together by the Catholic relief and immigration agency Caritas/Migrantes.
