Epilogue: the Italian-speaking south as Switzerland's bridge to Europe's south

What the metaphor can carry

Writers on Ticino have long been tempted to call it a gateway or a bridge. Such words are useful only as far as the facts support them. The facts collected in the preceding chapters support a precise version of the metaphor. For seven centuries the territory has been the place where the Confederation meets the Lombard plain: first as a road and a set of toll stations, then as subject lands, then as a canton that chose to be "free and Swiss" in 1798, and finally as the seat of a financial centre built on Italian clients. The bridge is above all legal and linguistic. It consists of a population that speaks the language of Italy and lives under the law of Switzerland, of professionals who read both legal orders, and of a set of treaties and institutions through which the two states manage their relationship.

Several of those institutions bear the marks of the south. The convention that governs civil jurisdiction between Switzerland and the European Union carries the name of Lugano, where it was signed in 1988 and again on 30 October 2007.¹ The double taxation convention of 1976, the agreement on cross-border workers of 2020 and the agreement on mutual assistance in criminal matters of 1998 are bilateral instruments whose daily application falls in large part to authorities and professionals in Ticino (Part H). The Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona brings federal justice in economic crime to the Italian-speaking canton. The base tunnels of the Gotthard and the Ceneri, opened in 2016 and 2020, have brought Lugano within about two hours of Zurich and an hour of Milan.² The physical road that made the territory a corridor in the thirteenth century has been rebuilt for the twenty-first.

Precedents

The function is old. The Milanese capitulations of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries were treaties of market access avant la lettre, securing toll privileges, the regulation of legal proceedings and the supply of grain and salt for the Confederates in Lombardy (Chapter A.IV). The Locarnese exiles of 1555 carried their Lombard connections to Zurich, where families of Italian or Locarnese origin such as the Orelli and the Muralt maintained agents in Bergamo, Milan and Verona who bought raw silk, arranged credit and sold Zurich goods in the Italian markets.³ In the nineteenth century the canton served as the refuge of the Risorgimento, and Carlo Cattaneo promoted the Gotthard railway from his house in Castagnola (Chapters C.II and C.III). Each of these episodes used the same combination of language, proximity and Swiss law that the modern financial centre uses.

What the bridge carries today

The traffic across the bridge has changed in character. In the lira economy it carried undeclared savings northwards and returned them as deposits, fiduciary placements and loans. Today it carries declared assets, succession plans, company relocations, steel and energy contracts, cross-border workers and judicial requests. The value lies in the coordination of the two sides. A Milanese family that wants its succession recognized in both states, a Lombard steel processor that buys through a Lugano trader, an Italian prosecutor who seeks Swiss bank records and a Ticino bank that must decide whether it may lend to a client in Varese all need professionals who understand both legal orders and can work in Italian.

The south of Europe extends beyond Italy, and the language that gives Lugano its access to Italy reaches only part of it. The facts of this book support a narrower claim. Italy is the neighbour with which Switzerland shares its longest southern border and a national language, and Lombardy is one of the largest regional economies of the European Union. For that relationship the Italian-speaking south performs a function that no other Swiss region can perform, as the constitutional equality of Italian and the location of the Federal Criminal Court acknowledge. Beyond Italy, the Lugano banks with networks in Latin America and the trading houses that serve Mediterranean and Eastern European markets use the same competences of language, law and cross-border practice (Chapters E.I and F.I).

Conditions of the bridge

A bridge needs maintenance, and the chapters of Parts J and K have described its conditions. The share of Italian speakers in Switzerland is declining slowly, and Italian is weak as an internal working language of the federal administration. English continues to spread as the language of finance. Market access to Italian clients depends on decisions in Brussels, Rome and Bern that Ticino cannot make alone. The demographic ageing of the canton and of its financial workforce will require new generations of professionals trained in both legal orders. If these conditions are met, the Italian-speaking south will remain the part of Switzerland through which the Confederation conducts its densest relationship with the south of Europe. If they are neglected, the bridge will still stand, but fewer people will cross it in Lugano.

Notes

1. Federal Office of Justice, "Lugano Convention 2007" (above); Federal Office of Justice, "Convention de Lugano 1988", https://www.rhf.admin.ch/fr/convention-de-lugano-1988, as cited in Chapter H.IV. ↩
2. Wikipedia, "Ceneri-Basistunnel", https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceneri-Basistunnel (opened on 4 September 2020, in regular service from 13 December 2020), and "Gotthard Base Tunnel", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel (Lugano–Zurich 1 hour 53 minutes in 2022, against 2 hours 41 minutes in 2016), used as a last resort, as cited in Chapter K.I. See also Chapter C.III. ↩
3. Paul Keller, "Der Einfluss der Hugenotten auf die Industrie der Stadt Zürich", Zeitschrift für schweizerische Statistik und Volkswirtschaft (1925), https://www.sses.swiss/journal/archive/pdf/1925/1925-I-26.pdf, naming the Orelli, Gosswiller, Römer, Holtzhalb, Pestalozza and Muralto with representatives in Bergamo, Milan and Verona, as cited in Chapter B.II. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.