Double Life – Winners

By Daniela Fubini*

How truly wonderful it is to have multiple nationalities and sometimes almost parallel lives across the continents and the seas. One of the great advantages is that you can tune out one of the nationalities and feel the other with much more intensity in particularly happy or interesting times in the international news, and that is exactly what happened to me (and I can guess to many other Europeans with double or triple nationality around Israel) last night.

Though it was known that Netta Barzilai had a strong chance of taking the Eurovision by a storm, I had to listen carefully to the song brought by Italy and consider it, and only after I could rejoice for the beautiful victory of Netta. The Italians didn’t stand a chance, let’s face it. You don’t go to the Eurovision with a song of social and political protest and no colorful feathers to spice it up a bit.

Netta on the other hand, is exactly what the show is thirsty of: little text, very to the point, easy music and color, a lot of loud color. Add to that the fighting tool she gave as a gift particularly to young girls all around the world: “not your toy” is a powerful mantra to repeat over and over when the world tells you that you have to be something that you are not and you will never be.

And that is a lot, for an Eurovision-packaged song.

So my Israeli nationality is currently overwhelmingly happy and proud while the Italian bas taken a low profile and is hiding somewhere between Sanremo and the sudden realization that not only Eurovision was lost to Italy, but also at the World Cup this year Italy doesn’t even have to show up.

Sad, just sad.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Tel Aviv, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.