In summer we long for the arrival of the pipistrelli, the night's blind bombardiers. We are grateful to anything that tackles mosquitoes, and a mature bat, hungry from its winter sleep, eats 3,000 a night. But they are disappearing in Italy. When every barn has become a country house and old bridges are replaced by smooth concrete, they have nowhere to sleep or hibernate. If you are ecologically minded, and want a handy hunter for the mosquitoes that plague you in the evening, you can have a bat-house of your own. The city of Fiesole is offering free nesting boxes to host families. Those of us with no gardens have to make do with zanzariere, mosquito screens that roll up like venetian blinds. But they allow one, at some aesthetic cost, to leave the windows open at night, and when the thermometer stands at 30 degrees by 9am, that soon gets the better of any regret at their ugliness.
By the middle of June, when schools close, thoughts turn to the mosquito-free air of the coast, and soon afterwards, anyone who can get away will be gone. July is the hottest month, and our ten-flat condominium will be empty then, and for most of August, its occupants cooling in their old family houses up in the mountains, or somewhere on the beach. There they will eat well, swim slowly, walk along the tide-line in family groups and finish off a day rich in sunshiny vitamin D with fresh fish and ice cream for their bones. It's not really a holiday, more a course in revitalisation; I have been advised countless times that my son's weak lungs need at least a month of seaside ozone every summer.
Perhaps you are there already, with Prospect shading your eyes from the sun. Wherever you are, on the Costa Smeralda, by the Tyrrhenian sea, in Portugal, Spain or the south of France, you will hear them—migrants from Africa, winding through the deckchairs and beach umbrellas, selling towels and silver necklaces, earrings and doughnuts. In the evenings they line the corniches, handbags and sunglasses spread out in front of them on cotton cloths. In every Italian city, too, they walk the streets with their merchandise, visible but unknown, their daily lives a mystery to those they work among. Indifference may encircle them in prosperous towns and cities, but in poorer areas where they labour on the land and live in makeshift shanty towns, Africans are often in danger. As for giving them money or buying counterfeit goods, my neighbours say, the problem is that behind the fake Gucci is the real mafia.
I meet Felix on the streets, selling the usual collection of lighters, pegs, paper hankies and socks. He is dressed in jeans and flip-flops with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. His Italian is poor and American-tinged. He is from Liberia, and like most people from that country of freed American slaves, his skin is much lighter that that of his west African neighbours. He came to Italy three years ago with the family savings, leaving his mother, two sisters and a decade of civil war. He does not know where his father is, he adds, shrugging: but that's common for Monrovia. Travelling up to Libya, he paid €1,500 to be ferried to Sicily. From there he begged his way up the peninsula. Every illegal arrival starts thus, with an outstretched hand. With a little money they can buy goods to sell; at first, cheap household items, and then counterfeit luxuries. Felix is traumatised; his hands begin to shake when he talks to me. He is eager to tell his story, but understandably gives me a false phone number. I hope for a good job, he says, a safer place to live, and to send money home. He had a black market job for a couple of months, but left it for fear of police controls. He has destroyed his Liberian papers, can't get legal work and without a job has no hope of even temporary residence. He believes that northern Europe is better, but he fears the rigours of the French police who bar his way there.
Mohammed, a tall Senegalese man whose patch is the lobby of our local supermarket, is doing better. Old ladies trust him with the irritating euro coinage; he buys and carries their shopping home and helps out with odd jobs. His fake handbags are a front; he makes more money selling counterfeit films and porn videos from a black plastic bag. He is confident and magnificently handsome; one day in a flowing white cotton suit and sandals, the next in loose jeans and loafers. Every now and again he does a modelling job in Milan for cash. Trained as a pharmacist in Brazil, he dreams of going back to Senegal one day to open his own pharmacy, though that day seems distant and receding.
I have talked, or tried to talk, to dozens of Africans. Some, like Victoria—who arrived from Nigeria with a job as a housekeeper already lined up, and who has two children with Italian citizenship—have residence and a future here. Others, like Mohammed, have confidence and hope. They may find a way to stay or even to get home. But most are illegal, and without documents have no home to be sent back to. What is Europe, let alone Italy, going to do about them and the thousands more who are arriving every month? Ciambelle! they shout across the sand, bombolone! Buying doughnuts isn't going to be enough.
