Put simply, when I listening to Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos last night she didn’t sound like she’s Italian.
Let me be clear what I mean. Mangiante is purportedly an Italian national who grew up near Naples. But to my ear she didn’t sound like a native Italian speaker speaks English. The accent seemed off to me. When I was much younger, I taught myself a very limited conversational Italian which I’ve now mainly forgotten. But obviously I’m not a native Italian speaker or even an English speaker who’s conversant in Italian. So I wouldn’t go by my ear. I just chalked it up to something weird and figured that others with more experience with these would have said something if there was an issue. Who knows what dialect or personal history might affect her inflection?
But then this morning I spoke to an Italian-American colleague who as it happens just spent two weeks in Italy. “Are you sure she’s Italian? She doesn’t have an Italian accent.” Okay, now I was a bit more curious. So I made a few calls and did some quick research. A lot of people on the Internet have asked the same question. Still, Internet conspiracy theories. What’s new? So I made some more calls, very much fearing I was falling into a rabbit hole.
The upshot is that I talked to some very knowledgable people and from what I can tell it’s basically an open secret that no one thinks Simona Mangiante is Italian. Everyone thinks she’s Russian – press, law enforcement, basically everyone. But ‘think’ isn’t proof. I confirmed on good authority, for instance, that she travels on an Italian passport. It seems like her claim isn’t easily disproven. Even she says that no one seems to believe she’s Italian, but she is. WTF?
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/prime-beta/what-the-f-is-going-on-here
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