The words of the migrant: tales of contemporary Italy1

² ‘Trasformiamo le chiese in grandi dormitoli’, unsigned report, La Repubblica (17 March 2007), 2.

³ Boursier, G., ‘Lecce — Don Cesare apre le porte del ept per un film-spot’, Il Manifesto (23 May 2004), 6 . The quotation is from an interview with Cesare Lodescrto in a documentan. about Regina Pacis, Un'incerta grazia (2004), supervised by Lodeserto himself and directed by Claudio Camarca.

⁴ Don Cesare Lodeserto was mentioned favourably in an article in he Monde Diplomatique in 2001 as one of the priests who were taking positive action to help women trafficked into sex work from eastern Europe (see Loncle, F., ‘Prostitution sans frontières: l'Europe de l'Ouest, proxénète des femmes de l'Est’, Le Monde Diplomatique (November 2001), 12–13).

⁵ The audio file of Thomson's original report and interview with Lodeserto can be heard on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/international/babies_20030612.shtml. For a text version of the report, see http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/europe/2981692.stm.

⁶ http://www.reginapacis.org/ (visited 23 February 2008).

⁷ Amnesty International, Lampedusa: ingresso vietato. Le deportazioni degli stranieri dall'Italia alla Libia (Turin, 2005), 23.

⁸ Boursier, G., ‘Gli immigrati? Intrinsecamente inattendibili’, Il Manifesto (23 July 2005), 8.

⁹ Mencherini, S., ‘Accolti a botte — Le inchieste sul ‘Regina pacis’’, Avvenimenti (2003), 1.

¹⁰ F. Gatti, ‘Io, clandestino a Lampedusa’, L'Espresso (7 October 2005). ‘Fisa’ means ‘hum’ in Arabic; ‘kulu kulu’ is a pidgin imitation of the verb ‘eat’: ‘a’‘kulu’, ‘ta’‘kulu’, etc. means ‘I eat’, ‘von eat’, etc.

¹¹ Vehbiu, A. and Devoie, R., La scoperta dell'Abania. Gli albanesi secondo i mass media (Milan, 1996).

¹² A. Vehbiu and Devole, La scoperta dell'Albania (above, n. 11), 8–9.

¹³ Macioti, M.A. and Pugliese, E., L'esperienza migratoria. Immigrati e rifugiati in Italia, fourth edition (Rome/Ban, 2006), 39.

¹⁴ Oriana Fallaci, in her article in Il Corriere della Sera following the 9/11 attacks, named ‘all the Muslim regions of Africa’ in her list of places in the world that ‘have always housed, financed and aided terrorism’: ‘Lettera da New York. La rabbia e l'orgoglio’, Il Corriere della Sera (29 September 2001), 23. The article became the nucleus of Fallaci's notorious book, La rabbia e l'orgoglio, whose Italian edition (Milan, 2001) sold over a million copies and was the subject of a lawsuit for racist defamation brought in 2002 by a Swiss Islamic group and by SOS Racisme.

¹⁵ See, for instance, the webpages about the Regina Pacis trials headed ‘Nostra Guantanamo di Lecce: violenza privata e CPT’, produced by the Associazione Culturale MODEM, based in Syracuse, Sicily: http://www.uonna.it/lecce-nostra-guantanamo.htm (visited 25 February 2008).

¹⁶ The Istat figures for January 2007, published in October 2007, are, at the time of writing, the most recent ones available. A summan of them is downloadable in pdf on http://www.istat.it/salastampa/comunicati/non_calendario/20071002_00/. The Dossier statistico figures arc cited in Ricci, A., ‘Roma: capitale dei romeni’, in Osservatorio romano sulle migrazioni. Terzo rapporio (Rome, 2007), 100.

¹⁷ See Ceraci, S., Maisano, B. and Motta, F. (eds), Salute 7.ingara (Rome, 1998) ; ‘The Roma of Kosovo’ in Amnesty International's 1999 report ‘FRY (Kosovo): a broken circle. ‘Disappeared’ and abducted in Kosoyo province’, available online at http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/libran/Index/ENGEUR701061999?open&of=ENG-2U5; S. Rifati, ‘The Roma and ‘humanitarian’ ethnic cleansing in Kosovo’, published in the California-based online newsletter Dissident Voice on 13 October 2002: http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Rifati_ Kosovo.htm.

¹⁸ See Castegnaro, A., Donne globali, Tate, colf e badanti (Milan, 2002) , and the two books by Ambrosini, M.. Utili invasori, L'inserimento degli immigrati nel mercato del lavoro italiano (Milan, 1999) , and La fatica di integrarsi. Immigrati e lavoro in italia (Bologna, 2001).

¹⁹ Abbatecola, F., L'altra donna. Immigrazione e prostituzione in contesti urbani (Milan, 2006), 11.

²⁰ Abbatecola, L'altra donna (above, n. 19), 102, 96.

²¹ Abbatecola, L'altra donna (above, n. 19), 103.

²² Vehbiu and Devole, La scoperta dell'Albania (above, n. 11).

²³ The text of the decree law, no. 181, ‘Disposizioni urgenti in materia di allontanamento dal territorio nazionale per esigenze di pubblica sicurezza’, was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, no. 255, 1 November 2007. It can also be read on the Ministry of the Interior website at http://www.intemo.it/miniiiterno/export/site,s/dcfault/it/.sezioni/servizi/legislazione/sicurezza/0998_Decreto_legge_01_l1_2007_n 181. html.

²⁴ ‘All'armi siam razzisti. Caccia ai rumeni, ruspe nei campi e prime espulsioni’, unsigned. Liberazione (2 November 2007), 1; M. Revelli, ‘Giocare col fuoco’, Il Manifesto (4 November 2007), 1.

¹ This article develops one part of my lecture, ‘Language conflicts and social exclusion in Italy since 1948’, given at the British Academy, London, on 25 June 2007. It also uses material from the seminar, ‘The new immigration in Italy: language and space’, held at the British School at Rome on 22 May 2007, which included contributions from Professor Amalia Signoreili of the Università di Napoli Federico II, and from the paper, ‘Migration to contemporary Rome: work, settlement and social exclusion’, given at ‘Evolving Societies’, a show case for the work of the British Academy's overseas Institutes and Societies, Barbican Centre, London, 15 November 2007.