Italian tennis superstar Jannik Sinner grew up in an Italian frontier town where hardly anyone speaks Italian natively.
He’s now helping bridge national divides in a corner of Italy that has long endured a difficult relationship with a central government that has by turns repressed it and granted it almost unparalleled autonomy.
Sexten, Sinner’s hometown, is 40 kilometers from the Austrian border, tucked in a valley in the Italian province of South Tyrol. But if you were to go for a stroll around the village, sucking in cool mountain air and looking out at snow-capped mountains and pine forests, you’d hardly know you were in Italy.
The architecture, with its timber-framed windows and gabled roofs, belongs more to neighboring Austria or Switzerland, and the blue and white street sign marking out the main thoroughfare reads “Dolomitenstrasse” in German first, with the Italian “Via Dolomiti” underneath.
For this region, whose people face questions about whether they’re really, truly Italian, Sinner — despite serving a brief drugs ban — has become an icon, bringing an earnest, mountaineering charm to an elite sport known for big personalities. He has done that while cultivating good relationships with the government in Rome — including Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni — the public and the press.
“He’s our number one hero right now across language groups, Italian and German,” said Marc Röggla, a South Tyrol native and head of the Center for Autonomy Experience, which studies minority rights in the region. “There’s this huge boom in tennis in South Tyrol. You see soccer fields transformed into tennis courts.”
“He’s showcasing the diversity of Italy,” he added.
Mountain boy
Sinner’s embrace of his motherland shouldn’t be taken for granted.
South Tyrol is a recent addition to the Italian state, annexed from Austria after the first World War. The Fascist regime repressed the local population, banning the use of German while encouraging ethnic Italian settlement. The return of democracy after the war meant a restoration of linguistic and cultural rights to the German-speaking population, now a minority in the larger region of Trentino Alto-Adige. But the relationship between the Sud Tirolians and the national government remained fraught; in the 1950s and 1960s there was a period of armed conflict that saw around 40 deaths.
In 1972, the government issued a statute of autonomy that pacified — but didn’t entirely eliminate — those tensions by granting the province expanded linguistic, legislative and tax-collecting rights.
Today, South Tyrol is among the richest regions in Europe, but identity remains fraught: The political landscape is dominated by the South Tyrolean People’s Party, a regionalist party representing the German-speaking community, while in 2023 local elections outright separatist parties won more than 10 percent of the vote in the province.
Those tensions linger, and occasionally flare up. Earlier this year, a political dust-up broke out when the mayor of the city of Merano refused to don the Italian tricolor during her inauguration ceremony.
Sinner deftly volleys these issues away, embracing his Italian passport while remaining rooted in his native South Tyrol.
The tennis champion was born into a German-speaking family in 2001; his father, Johann, worked as a cook and his mother, Siglinde, as a waitress in a nearby ski lodge. Sinner grew up attending the local German-speaking school, learning rudimentary Italian only as a second language. He has since learned to speak it fluently with only a slight accent.
The 24 year old has had a meteoric rise to the peak of tennis stardom, culminating with his July win at Wimbledon against the Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, his fourth grand slam title.
Asked in an interview with Vanity Fair last year whether he feels 100 percent Italian, Sinner said he was “very proud to be one.”
“We speak our German dialect, but in Sicily they also speak a dialect that isn’t understood in other parts of Italy, right?” he added.
Spaghetti and strudel
The tennis star, and his publicists, have played on both his embrace of the national culture, and what — with his mop of red hair and freckled face — is for Italians a slightly exotic charm. He went to Wimbledon sporting a Gucci bag, winning plaudits from the fashion press. He appeared next to superstar tenor Andrea Bocelli in a song about, no surprises, tennis.
In one surreal promotional video on his official website, Sinner is seen in a stylish Alpine knit jumper variously vacuuming a tennis court, rolling out fresh spaghetti and drinking an espresso.
Italians, in turn, have embraced Sinner like no South Tyrolean before. According to polling company Ipsos, he’s now the most popular active athlete in the country.
Carla Serena Monghini, a retired employee of Italy’s public broadcaster RAI, liked Sinner before he was cool. “He was this skinny little kid, scrawny, but with incredible grit. He would lose like an adult already — you could see how he took it on the chin,” recalled Monghini.
Monghini said she was drawn to Sinner’s elegance, his maturity and his dedication to hard work. “I spent five years in the mountains. I understand a bit what the type is like. They get straight to the point, don’t make a fuss, keep moving toward their goal,” she said.
Carlo Romeo, a historian of the region, called him a “symbol of Italian society’s multiculturalism.”
“Maybe decades ago he wouldn’t have been seen as properly Italian, as more Austrian. Today this identity is fully accepted,” he said.
Saint or Sinner?
For all the praise, Sinner isn’t without his critics.
Earlier in the year, writing in one of Italy’s leading papers, La Repubblica, journalist Corrado Augias labeled him a “reluctant Italian.” He pointed to Sinner’s decision to turn down an invitation to meet Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella, pleading tiredness. Sinner has, however, met Meloni on multiple occasions to celebrate successes.
Then there’s his taxes. He may sport an Italian flag in his Instagram profile, but Sinner, already worth upwards of $30 million, is domiciled in the micro-state of Monaco, a magnet for the ultra-rich — including several tennis stars — seeking to reduce their tax burden. Sinner has claimed he feels at home there, but the multi-millionaire’s refusal to pay into Italy’s state coffers has irked some members of the commentariat.
Sinner has also served up controversy on the tennis court.
He was criticized for skipping playing for the Italian national team in the Davis Cup to concentrate on his solo career. More contentiously, he was also recently given a three-month ban after testing positive for performance enhancing drugs, though the International Tennis Integrity Agency ruled that the substance had entered his bloodstream by accident.
There’s no doubt that Sinner, who is white and male, has had an easier ride than other Italian athletes from diverse backgrounds — like volleyball player Paola Egonu, an Olympic gold medalist born of Nigerian parents who last year was described by one right-wing politician as “not representing most Italians.”
But for now, Sinner’s popularity endures. And given his status as betting favorite entering the U.S. Open, which started Sunday, it has a chance to grow.
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