How to actually do business between Italy and Australia

Scott Cundill · 2026-09-17 · Milan

The short answer is through introductions from people each side already trusts. Distance is not what stops most people; not knowing anyone is.

There are about sixteen thousand kilometres between Milan and Sydney, and most people assume that is the problem. It is not. Distance is the easiest part. Freight moves, video calls work, contracts get signed by people who have never shared a room.

The real problem is that you do not know anyone on the other side, and nobody on the other side knows you.

That is a different kind of gap, and no amount of technology closes it. You can find a thousand Australian importers on a database in an afternoon. What you cannot find is the one who will actually pick up the phone, because someone they trust told them to.

The gap that is real, and the gap that is not

Start with the clock, because it is the thing everyone complains about first.

Italy and Australia sit between eight and ten hours apart, depending on which side has most recently moved its clocks. In practice that means nine in the morning in Milan is late afternoon or early evening in Sydney. It is a narrow window, but it is a window, and it is usably human at both ends. Italian mornings talk to Australian evenings. People who do this regularly stop noticing.

The clock is a scheduling problem. Scheduling problems get solved.

The gap that does not get solved by effort is the one where you are simultaneously a stranger, a foreigner, and a name with no context attached. In Italy, business moves on personal relationship. Who introduced you matters more than what you sent. In Australia, the style is more direct and less formal, but the underlying question is identical, and it is asked quietly: who vouches for this person?

Neither country answers that question with a cold email.

Two kinds of people, one corridor

The Italy-Australia corridor is not one audience. It is two, and the second one is almost always overlooked.

The first is obvious. Businesses that want to trade across. Italian food, wine, machinery, design, fashion and manufacturing looking for Australian distribution. Australian producers, agriculture, wine, minerals and services looking for European entry, and finding Italy a natural door. Professional firms on both sides with clients who have interests at the other end.

The second group is the interesting one. Italians living and working in Australia, and Australians living and working in Italy. Australia holds one of the largest Italian communities outside Italy, built over generations, and the connection is genuinely deep rather than ceremonial. Melbourne and Sydney have Italian business communities that are decades old.

People in that second group have something rare. They have the language, the cultural fluency and the context for both sides at once. What they often do not have is a network that spans the two. They know people here, and they know people there, and the two halves of their working life never quite connect.

That is the person this exists for as much as the exporter.

Why the usual approach fails harder across a border

Networking advice does not travel well. The standard version, more events, more connection requests, more follow-up, produces thin results at home. Across sixteen thousand kilometres it produces almost nothing, for reasons worth naming.

A cold approach carries no weight because there is no shared context to borrow from. At home, a stranger might have a mutual acquaintance, a known client, a suburb in common. Across a border, none of that is visible, so the recipient has nothing to check you against. Your message is not offensive, it is simply unverifiable, and unverifiable messages get ignored.

Trade shows and delegations work better, because they compress a year of contact into three days. But they are expensive, they are occasional, and the relationships built there decay quickly without something to hold them together in the eleven months in between.

Directories and databases give you volume with no trust attached. Volume is not the missing ingredient. If you needed more names, you would already have them.

What actually works, and it is not complicated

Somebody at the far end who can vouch for you, telling the person you need to reach that you are worth an hour, while you are copied in.

That is it. That is the entire mechanism, and everyone reading this has already benefited from it at least once, usually without noticing. The good client came from somewhere. The supplier who fixed the problem was mentioned by someone. The best hire was a friend of a friend.

A warm introduction works because it transfers something a cold approach cannot manufacture. It borrows an existing relationship. When someone an Australian already trusts says "you should speak to this person in Milan," the question of whether you are real has been answered before the conversation starts.

Strip away the software and what you are left with is this. A handful of people would answer the phone to you when your week has gone badly. A smaller handful would stake their own standing on you in front of a stranger. That second group is the whole of your commercial reach, and in Italy it is understood so instinctively that nobody bothers writing it down.

Those relationships usually start as work and turn into something closer, and it is the closeness that keeps them alive through a bad quarter. An acquaintance sends your details on. Someone who rates you calls ahead and tells them to expect you. One of those costs you a year, the other costs you a coffee.

The difficulty across a border has never been that introductions do not work. It is that most people do not have anyone standing on the other side willing to make one.

How the Bridge is built

The Italy-Australia Business Bridge exists to put someone on both ends.

Two hosts, one on each side. Most business communities have one organiser in one city. A bridge needs a named human at each end, one in Italy and one in Australia, because an introduction is only ever as good as the person making it, and that person has to actually know the local room. The Italian side is hosted from Milan. The Australian side is being founded now, and we are choosing the person who will hold it.

A person decides, every single time. You describe who you are hoping to reach. The host on that shore, who knows the room, works out whether the meeting would be any good for both of you, and writes to the pair of you together if it would. When the answer is no, nothing leaves. That act of judgement is the service, and it is the one part nobody should automate.

No bots, no scraped lists, no cold outreach. Members are not a database to be sold to. The whole arrangement depends on the room staying worth being in, which means nobody is pitched on arrival.

Your own trusted network travels with you. Every member keeps a personal profile and their own circle of trusted connections, so the value does not evaporate when an event ends. What you build here is yours.

It meets in both directions. Online across the gap, at an hour that works for an Italian morning and an Australian evening, and in person on each side as the local rooms grow.

You join by referral. The point is not to be the biggest network in either country. It is to be a room where every single person in it can be vouched for by somebody already inside it, which is the only definition of a trusted network that means anything.

Who this is for

You run a business in Italy and you want to be in Australia, properly, through someone rather than through a database.

You run a business in Australia and Europe is the next step, and Italy is where you want to start.

You are Italian and living in Australia, or Australian and living in Italy, and you are tired of having two separate professional lives that never introduce themselves to each other.

You are not looking for leads. You are looking for the two or three people, on the other side of the world, who would change the year.

Can the Bridge send me referrals?

It can, though not in bulk. When an Australian importer is looking for a producer in Puglia, or a Milan firm wants a distributor in Victoria, the host on the right side thinks of the person they would trust with it and makes the introduction. That is a referral, but a considered one, with a host's name behind it. There are no referral targets, and no fee per lead.

If you are in Australia, the Italian side is already standing

This is worth saying plainly, because it is the half that is genuinely hard to build from Sydney or Melbourne.

You do not need to construct a network in Italy from nothing, working through a list, hoping somebody answers. You need to be introduced into one that already exists, by somebody who is in it, in Milan, who knows who is worth your time and who is not. That side is staffed, and that is the side an Australian business cannot easily reach on its own.

It is part of the My Most Trusted network, which has 90,147 people in its Trusted Universe as of October 2026, so an introduction that starts in Milan does not have to stop in Milan.

And the Australian end, from Melbourne

A bridge needs somebody standing on both banks, and now it has one. The Australian end is held by Vincenzo Alaia, in Melbourne. He imports olive oil from Italy into Australia, so he knows from his own business what it takes to move an Italian product onto an Australian table: the suppliers, the paperwork, the long wait for a container, and the value of knowing the right person at the other end.

So an introduction can now start on either side. An Italian producer can be introduced to Australia through Vincenzo, and an Australian business can be introduced to Italy through Alessio.