There must be a difference between "familiare" and "parente", since they are both used in the extract below, but what is it? Can "familiare" be used as "acquaintance"?
La famiglia italiana è un ufficio di collocamento per i figli: un connazionale su tre dice d'aver trovato l'occupazione grazie a familiari e parenti. Metà degli ingegneri, il 40 per cento dei dentisti e il 25 per cento dei notai hanno ereditato il mestiere dei genitori.
Familiare (or famigliare) and parente are mostly synonyms, both meaning “relative”, a member of the same family.
I am ready to stand corrected, but my impression is that the writer just intended to stress his thesis about the familist approach in finding a job, rather than distinguishing two actually different categories. It would be a kind of dittologia sinonimica, the figure of speech consisting in highlighting a concept by saying it twice using synonyms (felice e contento, canuto e bianco, passi tardi e lenti).
Moreover, the writer might have been influenced by some actual, often used, phrases as amici e parenti (“friends and relatives”) or parenti e affini (“blood and in-law relatives”).
