I remember as a kid in the 1970s visiting Glasgow’s Casa d’Italia, the magnificent social club built by Scots-Italians in the 1930s. Despite its grandeur, it was a friendly, easy place. I knew the folk there. Not personally, necessarily, but they were familiar to me all the same. They laughed easily and spoke gruffly. They dressed well. And at a time when Glaswegians didn’t drink good coffee, they drank good coffee.

The Casa closed many years ago and it’s been a while since I saw those people in any kind of numbers. Then on Tuesday, at a Mass for the feast of All Souls, there they were again. Nearly 700 of them — the biggest gathering of Scots-Italians for more than a generation — laughing easily, talking gruffly.

Up front was a man whose own grandparents travelled here from Tuscany and Liguria more than a century ago to escape poverty and build a better life: Archbishop Mario Conti, the leader of Glasgow’s Catholics, potentate of the church and a “Tally” like the rest of us. You wished your grandfather could have witnessed the spectacle. “Hey Nonno,” you felt like shouting, “look at us now!”

This sense of delight stemmed from a feeling of belonging. Apart from the bitter experience of internment during the second world war, the Italian community has overwhelmingly been welcomed in Scotland. Yet a sense of fractured identity, of cultural confusion, continues to exist. Many Scots-Italians feel slightly out of place in both countries, outsiders wherever they go.

My own experience has been shared by many. As a youngster, “native” Scots labelled me a foreigner because of my name, but they thought I was a reasonably clever guy. In Italy, on the other hand, they took me as one of their own — and considered me an idiot for my plodding use of language. I could never be as Italian as those teenagers on their Vespas whom I saw each summer, whose identity was so ingrained they didn’t even know it was there.

So where did that leave me? Was I simply a second-rate Italian, condemned to playing catch-up with those lucky enough to have been born and bred in the Old Country?

I was well into my thirties before I found the answer. I was neither a Scot with a funny name nor a poor relation to the people I met on holiday. I was a pure-bred, 100% Scots-Italian; part of a group with a history that spans three centuries and whose members have had an influence in business, sport and the arts that is out of all proportion to their modest numbers.

To me, this was a revelation. I no longer had to justify why, if I was so proud of my Italian roots, I didn’t just move back there. Nor did I have to apologise for my linguistic shortcomings. After all, I’ve yet to meet an Italian who speaks English as well as I do, and I speak Italian a damn sight better than most Scots.

I wasn’t the only one with “issues”. I remember a classmate who enjoyed playing war games with lines of soldiers and tanks. It was always Britain versus Italy, and Britain always won. Noisily, spectacularly, overwhelmingly. Nothing unusual there, you might say, except for this: the kid was as Italian as they come. Name, face, everything. And maybe that was the point. The only way he could convince his ginger-haired, freckle-faced buddies that he was one of them was by publicly attacking the part of his heritage that made him different. While everybody else was taking on Panzer divisions and Kamikaze squadrons, he was bombing the Bersaglieri.

Another memory: the first time I saw the Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing. The movie features a character whose pizza house is covered with pictures of famous Italian-Americans: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Joe DiMaggio.

I remember taking great delight in this when I saw the movie, but also being slightly envious. Why couldn’t I walk into a Glasgow pizzeria and see the heroes of my community? They are not in short supply: Eduardo Paolozzi, Tom Conti, Peter Capaldi, Daniela Nardini, Dario Franchitti, Lou Macari and Sharleen Spiteri spring to mind, and there are many more.

These people aren’t second-rate Italians, and nor are they Scots with funny names. They are full-blooded members of my community, a community that shouldn’t have to choose between the country of its ancestors or the country of its birth in order to forge a stable identity.

If I were to sit down with any of the people listed above, or with any one of the Scots-Italians crowded into St Andrews Cathedral last week, we could come up with countless common experiences that help define who we are.

Times Recommends

• Time-worn Freddie gives up Test matches
• Brighton company 'involved in cyber attack'
• The art of survival: it’s all in the mind