  Italy is characterized by a one-of-a-kind linguistic diversity landscape in
Europe, which implicitly encodes local knowledge, cultural traditions, artistic
expressions and history of its speakers. However, most local languages and
dialects in Italy are at risk of disappearing within few generations. The NLP
community has recently begun to engage with endangered languages, including
those of Italy. Yet, most efforts assume that these varieties are
under-resourced language monoliths with an established written form and
homogeneous functions and needs, and thus highly interchangeable with each
other and with high-resource, standardized languages. In this paper, we
introduce the linguistic context of Italy and challenge the default
machine-centric assumptions of NLP for Italy's language varieties. We advocate
for a shift in the paradigm from machine-centric to speaker-centric NLP, and
provide recommendations and opportunities for work that prioritizes languages
and their speakers over technological advances. To facilitate the process, we
finally propose building a local community towards responsible, participatory
efforts aimed at supporting vitality of languages and dialects of Italy.
