RN
The old version of this page did something odd. It spent its opening paragraph establishing that its subject was a serious person with a degree, published essays and a magazine column — and then spent the next two thousand words writing about her in a register that would be indefensible if any of that opening had been meant. The credentials were there as an adjective. Nothing in the rest of the page proceeded as though they were true.
There is a smaller thing in that headline worth pulling on instead, because it turns out to be genuinely useful: the word "Italian", which in an adult catalogue is one of the most overloaded labels in use.
Four things the tag can mean
The performer's nationality. This is what the label most often reflects and the least informative version of it, because a performer's passport says nothing about what a scene is or who made it. Most of the scenes the old page listed appear, from their own titles, to be productions of large English-language companies. Filed under a nationality tag, they arrive looking like something they are not.
Where the scene was shot. A different claim entirely, and often true of work that carries no national tag at all — international companies shoot on location constantly, and location rarely makes it into metadata.
The home market of the producer. This is the one people usually mean. There are national industries with their own studios, their own distribution, their own conventions about pacing and framing and what a scene is for, developed largely independently of the American model. Someone looking for that is looking for a producer, not a person.
The language of the dialogue. The most practical distinction and the one almost never tagged. A scene made by a domestic producer for a domestic audience is in that audience's language. A scene with an Italian performer made by an American company is in English. If dialogue is part of what you are looking for, this is the only one of the four that matters, and no tube tag will tell you.
Why the conflation is a real problem
Because it fails in both directions.
Search a nationality and you get a performer's whole international catalogue: mostly big-company scenes in English, sorted by an attribute of a person rather than an attribute of the work. The distinctive national production you were after is buried under it, since a domestic studio's output is smaller and travels less.
And search for a performer and the nationality tag drags in everything else tagged the same way, most of which has nothing to do with them.
The tag is not lying. It is answering a question nobody asked, and doing it loudly enough to drown out the two that were.
Searching by origin instead
The reliable move is to stop searching attributes and start searching producers.
Identify the companies. National industries are legible at the studio level — a domestic producer has a name, a catalogue and a house style, and once you have two or three names you have a thread to pull. Performer databases are useful here even when you do not care about performers, because they index releases by studio, which makes production origin visible in a way that no platform tag does.
Then go to the catalogues. Studio subscription sites publish their own output in their own language with their own titles intact, and video-on-demand platforms carry the disc-era catalogues of national industries that never had a subscription site at all — which for European production in particular is where a great deal of it still lives.
And treat tube sites as what they are: excellent for finding out whether a style suits you, useless as a record of where anything came from, because the tag was applied by an uploader who was describing a person.
A last note on the word
A performer does not choose the nationality tag, does not benefit from it, and cannot remove it. It is the one label on their catalogue attached to something they were rather than something they did — which is a reasonable place to end a page that used to lead with it as a boast, in a headline, attached to a body part.