Sharing information with someone in Italian culture is an act of relationship-building. When someone gives you useful intelligence — a contact, an insight, a heads-up — they are investing in the relationship and signaling trust. Receiving that information creates an unspoken obligation: protect it, reciprocate when you can, and honor the trust it represents.
If someone who normally shares information with you stops doing so, it signals that the relationship has cooled. Information decisions are always relationship decisions.
The question is never just “Is this useful to share?” but always also “What does sharing or not sharing say about this relationship?” This is why information exchanges often feel personal even when the content is purely professional. Treating information as neutral data, detached from the human relationship, misses how Italians actually experience it.
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