The Italians (43 page)

People who in other countries would be considered foreigners even sit in the Italian parliament. Nationality under Italian law is determined mainly by what is known as jus sanguinis (“right of blood,” i.e., descent) and not jus soli (“right of soil,” i.e., place of birth). Having just one Italian parent makes you an Italian
^*
and qualifies you to pass on your citizenship to the next generation. But since your Italian parent may also owe his or her nationality to a single Italian parent, you can have only one genuinely Italian grandparent and still be an Italian (even if you have never set foot in Italy and do not speak a word of the language). The government keeps a register of overseas Italians, known as the Anagrafe degli Italiani Residenti all’Estero (AIRE). There are well over four million people on it, and if they fulfill the age requirements for Italian elected representatives, they can run in Italian elections for a seat in the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies. There are four overseas constituencies: one each for Europe, South America, Central and North America, and the rest of the world.

Until a few years ago there was even a beauty contest to choose a Miss Italia nel Mondo. Winners included contestants with such un-Italian first names as Rudialva, Stephanie and Kimberly.

The idea that Italianness is something you inherit rather than something you acquire because of where you grow up has inevitably complicated the task of integrating the immigrants who began to arrive in Italy in sizable numbers in the early 1980s. The application of jus sanguinis also means that tens of thousands of second-generation immigrants, who are far more culturally Italian than many of the “overseas Italians,” grow up in a kind of limbo. Since, for example, they do not have Italian passports, they often cannot join their classmates on trips abroad in Europe because they need a visa and that is often impossible to obtain in the required time. To acquire citizenship, they have to make an application before their nineteenth birthday. If they fail to do so, they lose the right forever.

There had always been a sprinkling of foreigners. But in the censuses taken between 1871 and the outbreak of the Second World War they accounted for barely a quarter of 1 percent of the population.
³
After the war, Italians returning from the colonies brought with them some of the first non-European immigrants, often as servants. The next wave consisted mainly of seasonal workers who, beginning in the late 1960s, arrived to take part in harvesting and, in some cases, stayed on to find other employment: Tunisians in Sicily, sub-Saharan Africans in Campania hired to pick tomatoes, Eastern Europeans in Trentino employed to bring in the apple crop. The earliest Filipino immigrants, most of whom went into domestic service, also reached Italy at about this time. During the 1970s and 1980s some immigrants from outside the EU—known in those days as
extracomunitari
—began to take factory jobs in the north.

When I came to Italy for my first tour of duty as a foreign correspondent in 1994, I nevertheless found a country that was still largely white. According to the census carried out three years earlier, resident and nonresident foreigners accounted for just 1.1 percent of the total population. The count and countess who lived in the flat next door had a Sri Lankan manservant. A couple of streets away, there was a bar owned by an Eritrean. And that was about as far as multiculturalism went in our neighborhood of Rome.

Within a year or so, though, the square nearest to our flat had become a meeting place for women from the Cape Verde Islands who were much in demand as cleaners and nannies. And when the next census was held, the proportion of foreigners was found to have doubled. Since then, the figure has soared. By 2014, it was reckoned that nearly 8 percent of the population had been born in another country.

By far the largest community was made up of Romanians. But since their country had joined the EU seven years earlier, they could no longer be classed as
extracomunitari.
^*
The next-biggest groups were, in order, from Morocco, Albania, China, Ukraine and Philippines. What is striking about that list is that not one sub-Saharan African country is on it. Yet the images that Italians and others have come to associate with migration to Italy are those of people, mostly of African origin, crowded into rickety boats that have set off from the other side of the Mediterranean. One explanation for this is that a high percentage of the Africans soon move on to other countries further north. The majority of the immigrants who stay in Italy come in by other means. Some cross a land border into the EU and then take advantage of the open borders within the so-called Schengen area to make their way to Italy. Others arrive on a tourist or business visa, and then overstay.

They unquestionably come in response to a demand for labor. But the overwhelming majority arrived on Italian soil in a way that was either unauthorized or illegal. (In 2009 Silvio Berlusconi’s government made entering Italy without proper documentation an offense, but irregular immigration has since been decriminalized.) That makes it easier for those native Italians who resent the newcomers to find reasons for criticizing their presence. The OECD has estimated that for every twenty legal immigrants in Italy, there could be as many as three illegal ones.

Italians will often tell you—and with vehement conviction—that their country is free of racism. That ought maybe to be the case: Italians themselves have experienced prejudice as immigrants and should therefore be less inclined than most to discriminate against outsiders. In the United States, for example, they had to contend with being identified with the Mafia and being branded as “wops.”

But to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, it is clear that racism in Italy does exist. It is especially prevalent in two areas: among the supporters of the Northern League and in and around football stadiums. When Cécile Kyenge, a naturalized Italian born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, became her country’s first black minister in 2013, she had to put up with a barrage of insults from members of the Northern League. Roberto Calderoli,
^*
by then the deputy speaker of the Senate, said that she reminded him of an orangutan. Long before that, it was common for black soccer players on visiting—and even sometimes home—teams to be greeted with banana throwing and outbreaks of monkey noises from the terraces where the
ultras
hung out. But the footballing authorities have cracked down with growing severity on fan racism, and the brilliant if erratic performance on the field of Italy’s first black striker, Mario Balotelli,
^*
has done much to draw the sting of race hate in Italian soccer.

What you notice more in Italy than outright racism is gross insensitivity. Take, for example, what happened on a TV game show one evening in 2013. The host, one of Italy’s leading showbiz personalities, Paolo Bonolis, put on a black wig to make fun of the Filipinos, mimicking their accent in Italian. At any time, the Philippine community might have taken offense, especially since the sketch began with a playing of their national anthem. But Bonolis did his comic turn for millions of viewers as the Filipinos were struggling to recover from the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan, which had ripped through their country just five days earlier, leaving more than six thousand people dead.

“In Britain, I have certainly encountered racism,” said a young African who worked with me in Rome. “But there the racists know they are racists, and so do you. Here, people will say the most offensive things to me, but without in any way meaning to be racist. It is disconcerting—they just don’t know you should not say those kinds of things to a black woman. I often don’t know how to react.”

Arguably, this kind of thing is a result of the speed with which Italy has acquired its immigrant population and the relatively short period in which Italians have had to adapt to the sensitivities of foreigners. Cringe-inducing examples of a lack of racial awareness include golliwog-like figures advertising chocolate, news reports that identify the ethnic origin of suspects only when they are non-Italians, and exploitative bosses being described as
negrieri
(a trafficker or overseer of
negri,
or “negroes”).

Using data from the period 2005–2007, the World Values Survey gave Italy a mixed report card. It found that racist attitudes in Italy were more prevalent than in some other European countries, but less common than in others. For example, 11 percent said they did not want neighbors of a different race, against fewer than 5 percent in Britain, but almost 23 percent in France. Bearing in mind that Britain—not to mention France—has had a longer time in which to adjust to immigration, Italy’s showing could be regarded as promising. As Italy’s immigrants become more integrated into society, it is to be hoped that the prejudice the early arrivals encountered will diminish.

But that remains to be seen. A comparison with Spain is less encouraging. The Spanish have experienced even more rapid and recent immigration. Yet less than 7 percent of the respondents there told the World Values Survey’s pollsters they did not want neighbors of a different race (although that, of course, leaves open the question of whether the Spanish were really more inclined to welcome outsiders or just more reluctant to admit that they did not).

Other factors argue for caution in assessing whether racism in Italy will be reduced to irrelevance. One is the objective difficulty that immigrants face in becoming part of Italian society. Successive amnesties have given most of the new arrivals the right to stay in Italy. But since citizenship depends primarily on ancestry, it is much more difficult for them to take the next step and become Italian. In practice, it is almost impossible for first-generation immigrants to acquire citizenship unless they marry an Italian. Their children must wait until they are eighteen to apply.

Another doubt stems from the absence of any widespread reckoning with Italy’s colonial past. It is not that this is a divisive issue; it could almost be said that it is not an issue of any kind. Until very recently, it was as if the Italians had never had anything to do with Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia or Libya. The question of whether the plight of the Horn of Africa might have something to do with its conquest and exploitation by Italians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was never raised in the media. And according to a recent study, in the sixty years from 1945 to 2005 only one film was produced and one novel published about Italy’s colonial past.
⁴
The book—Ennio Flaiano’s
Tempo di uccidere
(“Time to Kill”)—was the basis for the film of the same title. Movies made by foreigners about the period were ignored.
Lion of the Desert,
a critically well-received movie about the Libyan resistance leader Omar Mukhtar, funded by the Libyan government and featuring a number of Hollywood stars, was never released in Italy.

This reluctance to face up to the colonial past may now be changing, if only very slowly. Since the mid-2000s, several Italian novelists have shown an interest in the period, as have members of a first generation of immigrant authors.

If attitudes have changed toward Italy’s Romani population, however, it has been in the direction of more, not less, intolerance.
Zingari
(“Gypsies”) have been living in Italy since the fifteenth century. The Sinti, who regard themselves as a subgroup distinct from the Roma, arrived from the north. Other Romani groups migrated from the Balkans and settled in the south and center of Italy. But in recent years Italy’s Romani population has doubled. First came an influx of Roma from the former Yugoslavia. It began modestly in the 1970s, but increased dramatically in the 1990s as wars erupted, tearing the country apart. Finally, large numbers of Roma arrived from Romania, particularly after Romania joined the EU in 2007. Even so, the total number of Roma and Sinti in Italy is reckoned to be around 150,000, about a quarter of 1 percent of the total population, one of the lowest proportions in Europe.
⁵

Anti-Gypsy prejudice is scarcely confined to Italians, nor are the authorities in Italy the only ones who have had difficulty in framing policies for their Romani minority. But what is unusual is the Italian insistence on regarding all Sinti and Roma as
nomadi
(“nomads”). The term is widely used, not only by politicians, officials and journalists, but also by those who seek to offer support to the Romani population. The oldest Catholic voluntary association in the field, which has been recognized by the government since 1965, is known as Opera Nomadi.

Leaving aside the fact that it was discrimination and persecution that forced an itinerant lifestyle on the Romani peoples in the first place, and that many of Italy’s own Sinti and Roma integrated when they could, the term
nomadi,
when applied to the previously settled Roma of the Balkans, is more than just misleading. It implies that the newcomers should be put into camps (on the assumption that, as nomads, they will soon wish to move on, and perhaps in hopes that they will want to move on to somewhere outside Italy).

Segregation has been at the core of official Italian policy since the 1980s, when local authorities began establishing camps in response to a spate of regional laws that called for them as a way of respecting the Romani peoples’ “nomadic” culture. In 2007, the particularly savage murder of an Italian woman on the outskirts of Rome sparked an explosion of anger. Police arrested an immigrant Romani man and the then center-left government—already under pressure from the right to do something about growing numbers of informal encampments in and around the main cities—panicked. It rushed out a decree that enabled the authorities to deport from Italy any EU citizens held to be a threat to security. More than six thousand people were subsequently evicted from camps in Rome.

The Berlusconi government, which came into office the following year, took matters a big step further by declaring “a state of emergency in relation to the encampments of the nomad community in the territories of the regions of Campania, Lazio and Lombardy.” Two more regions, Piedmont and Veneto, were added later.