Lorenzo Tondo explains why Italians are reviving a tradition of such dubious distinction
Padua, Italy — Almost 500 years after giving the world its first official ghetto, residents of northern Italy are dusting off the concept and putting it back into service.
This week, several leading newspapers reported that Milan’s mayor is planning to build a wall around a camp for migrant Roma on the edge of the city. The decision seems to have come in response to an ugly incident that took place on Christmas Eve, when a crowd of about 100 demonstrators in Opera, on Milan’s southern outskirts, attacked another campsite — and burned it to the ground.
The facility was meant to be a winter refuge for about 70 of the nomads, half of them children, but its existence had been bitterly opposed by local residents. Led by members of the municipal council, protesters marched into the settlement, bearing cans of gasoline. Later, they emerged to parade through the streets displaying the victims’ tents like trophies, and yelling, “We don’t want Gypsies here.”
It now appears that Letizia Moratti, who last year became Milan’s first woman mayor, wants to have a second camp surrounded with a barrier in an apparent attempt to prevent further acts of violence.
The move has been greeted with enthusiasm. “We want the wall,” area residents told reporters. “We are becoming too racist.”
But the proposed barricade is the latest example of a back-to-the- future approach to race relations that Italians have adopted in recent months — and not always with the best of intentions.
On March 29, 1516, the Venetians created the first ghetto, decreeing that Jews, whose presence in the republic had been precarious at best, could avoid banishment by residing in a strictly defined district.
In 1797, Napoleon put an end to Venice’s enforced segregation. But two centuries later, and 50 kilometres inland, the walled ghetto made its comeback.
Padua is one of Italy’s more vibrant and productive communities. Famous among Catholic pilgrims for its protector, St. Anthony (whose tongue is venerated here as a religious relic), and to Shakespeare fans as the setting for The Taming of the Shrew, the city has a downtown that is an architectural jewel, filled with beautiful squares, luxury shops and lively pubs where young people gather to enjoy a glass of “spriz,” a blend of wine, beer and Brio.
As well, Padua boasts a vast array of production plants operated by leading Italian corporations, and not far from the factories sit six run-down apartment buildings, with peeling green paint, sticky stairwells and satellite dishes on almost every balcony, that have come to be known as Via Anelli Ghetto.
This is the home of the city’s largely north African immigrant community, and it is not a happy place. In the shadow of one building, a group of Tunisians stand talking and staring at anyone who passes. Rising behind them like a mighty tidal wave is a huge steel wall. It sprang up last summer when, 200 years after Napoleon’s muscle allowed Jewish Venetians to start living where they pleased, the people of this elegant and wealthy city of 210,000 decided to divide and conquer their minorities.
A carpet of garbage leads to a passageway through the wall, where access is controlled by a police car 24 hours a day. Local authorities say they built the wall because they needed something to keep ghetto residents in and everyone else out.
Padua owes much of its wealth to the presence of immigrants willing to work for extremely low wages. But in recent years, newcomers have lost much of their reputation for being hard workers.
The influx of migrants into Italy has been so great — almost 2.7 million immigrants were recorded in 2005, an increase of more than a quarter-million from the previous year — that many from the poorest of African nations end up in desperate circumstances, unable to find a job or even housing. To support themselves, they turn to prostitution, theft and the sale of drugs.
When they were built, the apartments of the Via Anelli were to be for students. The University of Padua, one of the more prestigious in Italy, is only a few kilometres away. But in the past 15 years, the complex has become home to countless immigrants because it is all that a poor immigrant can afford. Some apartments cover just 28 square metres and house nine people.
As poverty sparked prostitution and drug trafficking in the area, two rival gangs formed: Nigerians conbers of the Lega Nord to youthful supporters of Forza Nuova, who shave their heads and sport swastikas and other fascist symbols — have come to interpret such barriers as icons that legitimize their point of view.
“This is a concrete risk,” Mr. Jackson concedes, adding that it’s “no coincidence” that xenophobic groups now “go parading around Padua,” while those in Schio are now “manipulating” the ditch construction to their advantage.
“Someone,” he declares, “needs to remind these people how many Gypsies ended up in concentration camps and in the Nazis’ crematoriums — at least, as long as that is not what they want as well.”
Lorenzo Tondo is a freelance writer based in Rome.
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