The idea of making “La Colazione Italiana e il Mago Indiano” has been in my thoughts since long as I wished to bring to the forefront the contribution of migrant workers in something which has been very typical in Italian life, and has been associated with the Italian tradition, and over time has become an identity with which Italian’s associate.

This short docufilm represents through the story of a typical Italian breakfast that is cornetto and cappuccino, the story of people around it. The Barista, the habitual customer, and the cornetto maker. Around this breakfast we can observe many things from food habits which go across national boundaries to nations and cultures far from the concerned territory. We can observe how a migrant who has never seen a cornetto is making the “typical” breakfast item of a nation a culture. And how the whole industry of this breakfast is now either worked or managed by migrant workers in this case Indians from the state of Punjab. And we also see that the people are completely unaware of this phenomenon.

Many of the theories of globalization of the work force and a certain kind of communication and how a certain kind of work is taken over by migrant communities. Usually, such labor-intensive professions are not of choice by the locals and are left to emarginated or migrant workers.

The perception and reality of everyday things behind the curtain are quite different.

In this film we also come to see the forced migration during the second world war through the testimony of an elderly customer of the bar where he explains through his personal life story how he moved to Switzerland from Italy and how the life was hand to mouth, the struggle of during that period. How the Italian and European migrants will move to Switzerland for a better life, similarly we observe through the testimony of the Indian cornetto makers both an entrepreneur “social mobility” and a worker. They moved to Italy to improve their lives in the recent past.
If we look through this documentary culture and migration and how the melting pot “happens”. We can see the migrant entrepreneur is happy to be in Italy he expressed during the interview he loves Italian food and expressed (not used in the video) that all is made of wheat both the Indian chapati and the Italian piadina. And if we go on the “bourgeoise” sphere of the society, the customer explains how the Literary cafes have been centers of culture from 1800s onwards. The Café has been a place of aggregation of ideas and thoughts influencing local culture and national policies.
If we look at the language as part of culture and the most important tool of integration, we observe that the elder in the documentary mentions that even though he is born in Rome, his first language is the dialect which is spoken in the Canton Grigioni area of the Italian speaking Swiss region, later on when he came back to Rome, he learned the Roman dialect.
Similarly, in the case of two Indian origin migrants we can observe the difficulty of expressing themselves in the Italian language even though they are very much integrated in the social and economic life.

We can also observe the labor and migration channels how a certain community moves from one area to another following the same path as that of their kin or community members and find a space in the host nation both physical (choice of place for residing) and economic (choice of profession).