I was recently asked, after coming back from a vacation, if I consider "home" to be in Italy or in Copenhagen.
It is a simple question, but not an easy one to answer for many people in 2017. I have been in Denmark for 9 years, Copenhagen is the city where I live, work, where my kids go to school (2 out of 3 were born here) and where most of my things are. Yet, after all this time, every time I go to Italy I find myself invariably saying that I am going "home". Even when, like in my last visit, the place I am going to is more than 1000 km from the place where I was born and spent most of childhood. Reflecting more about it, I don't recall having used "home" to talk about Denmark even though I am pretty sure to have used the word "casa" which is the Italian equivalent but without the strict separation offered by the English language between the physical place and the emotional one.
What is "home" then?
As it happens often these days, it seems a case of a word describing a bundle of concepts which used to be together but are currently being unbundled. We have "home" the cultural place we belong to (Italy in my case), home the place where we live, home the place we grew up, etc. For most people, and most of the time, all these places used to be located in the same place. Today this is less and less the case.
It will be interesting to see if our language will evolve to describe this new reality or if we will simply go on using one word for many things and many places. I thrive in ambiguity, so count me in on that.