To its people, Venice is probably at its most beautiful when seen from afar, like in one of Canaletto's eighteenth century
vedute.
On an autumn afternoon, when its magnificent palaces are reflected in
the shimmering water, Venice, in all its unreal beauty, really does look
like a movie set.
Indeed Venice today is not much more than a stage setting.
When my first floor neighbour at the palazzo where I had rented an
apartment finally came downstairs, I pulled shut the heavy front door.
In her late eighties, Signora Immacolata walked with a cane. We headed
down Calle dei Fabbri for her to show me the nearest supermarket. Our
progress was slow, not only because of her but because at nine o'clock
in the morning the street leading from the Rialto bridge to Saint Mark's
Square was already packed with tourists. Diminutive and stooped,
dressed in black, Signora Immacolata barely managed to make her way
through the crowds, dragging her shopping cart behind her. When we
reached the first little bridge she stopped. Holding onto the railing,
she barely managed to haul herself onto it. There are two such bridges
crossing the canal on the way to the supermarket and both of them are
stepped. Even though the Co-op supermarket near the Campo Santa Maria
Formosa is only a leisurely five or six minute walk from her house, it
takes Signora Immacolata at least twenty minutes to get there. And when
we arrive we find a long line at the checkout counter, because every
budget-conscious tourist invariably seems to find their way here. All in
all, it takes the old lady at least an hour to do her shopping. "And
it's like that every day..." she sighs. Her legs are still okay but she
cannot carry things up the stairs. Luckily, her
badante, the Croatian woman who looks after her, is due back soon.
There used to be a bakery near her apartment in Corte Gragolina, and
little general stores, and a butcher's and a green grocer's, and a
newsstand, and a cobbler – in short, everything needed for everyday life
was close at hand. Now they have all been transformed into souvenir
shops. Her street is a continuous succession of small shops selling fake
Murano glass, pizzerias charging eight euros a slice, tourist
restaurants, bars and pastry shops. That entire area around Saint Mark's
Square has only two supermarkets, one smaller than the other, and, I
think, a single post office that I had a hard time finding.
"Venice is not a city you can live in normally anymore," says my
neighbour, a bank clerk who lives in the building across from ours. "You
can't make it to work or to an appointment on time in the morning
because it's so crowded that somebody my age simply can't push his way
onto the
vaporetto. The whole infrastructure is geared toward
tourists, from the prices in stores and restaurants to the theatre
performances in English and concerts of classical music in churches
where the musicians wear Baroque costume. Property is absurdly
expensive, and there are fewer and fewer supermarkets, schools,
kindergartens, clinics, hospitals."
My neighbour is right, of course. In the past fifty or so years Venice
has lost 65 per cent of its population and only 23 per cent, mostly
older people, live in the city's historical centre. Just a few decades
ago, 150,000 people lived in the old part of town, but today that number
is barely 40,000, and it is steadily declining: partly because Venice
is too expensive to live in and people are moving to outlying areas, to
Mestre for instance, and partly because there is no work for the young
and educated. Venice has an excellent university, lots of young people
come here to study, but they don't stay. "If you don't want to be a
waiter or a maid or to help the elderly, you don't have much of a
choice. And even those jobs have been taken by foreigners, by
immigrants," says my neighbour resignedly.
Still, there's no need to shed a tear for the Venetians. Some are
earning a pretty penny from renting out apartments, others have sold
their property and are now nibbling away at their capital. The fact
remains, however, that for those who live here – and it is an aging
population – life is becoming increasingly hard. One has to survive the
onslaught of millions of tourists every year, that mass of people
pouring through the streets of this magnificent city of canals and
little alleyways that are rarely more than three or four metres wide.
Venetians know only too well that they are living not in a city but in a
museum. And that Venice is becoming less and less a real, living city,
and more and more a museum of Europe's past, embodying all the glory,
wealth, power, beauty and art of times long past. That is precisely why
millions of tourists come to see it. The mass tourism industry was the
first to realize that there was money to be made not only out of the
splendour of Venice but also its importance as an open-air museum.
At the same time, the Venice of today is a perfect metaphor for Europe
as it once was, the Europe whose culture and values Europeans swear by,
take pride in and wish to preserve.
Bari, in the far south of Italy, offers a very different picture from
Venice. It is still warm. It is the end of September, but the
holidaymakers have gone. On a Sunday evening in the Piazza del Ferrarese
in the old part of town, the incidental tourist will find the locals
perched on a low wall or sitting in little cafés drinking beer or
strolling around the square, which serves as a kind of
corso, a
promenade. The several thousand people gathered in the square look as if
they all know each other, children are playing tag at nine o'clock in
the evening, teenagers are cooling themselves off with an ice-cream and
their nicely dressed parents, and even grandparents, are standing around
talking loudly, gesticulating, like in one of Vittorio De Sica's
black-and-white movies from the 1960s.
This is a lively town. If Venice is where old Europe is dying, then Bari
is where new Europe is emerging. It is one of the entry points for
immigrants to Europe.
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1991, an Albanian freighter called the
Vlora
sailed into the port of Bari carrying more than twenty thousand
refugees. Older readers will probably remember that Albanian exodus
across the Adriatic Sea, prior to their "velvet revolution", if the
Albanians ever had one. A picture of the huge freighter crammed with
people made the rounds of the world at the time. Sometimes, a single
photograph can symbolize a particular time or a historical event. So it
was with Jeff Widener's photograph of a lone man facing a column of
tanks in Tiananmen Square. And with Nick Ut's picture of the naked
little Vietnamese girl and her brothers scorched by napalm, with Eddie
Adams's photograph of a police chief in Saigon shooting dead a Vietcong
with his pistol, and with the recent photo of prisoners being tortured
at Abu Ghraib. And so it is with Luca Turi's famous photograph of the
Vlora. His exhibition,
Flight of the Eagles, marking the twentieth anniversary of the event, had just opened in the foyer of the Teatro Petruzzelli. As the
Vlora
sails in, people throng the decks and railings, clusters of human
beings hang from the smoke-stack, from the ropes, from the masts. In the
next picture they are within reach of the shore and are jumping into
the water, swimming, as if afraid that the land will slip from their
grasp. And then there is a superb but terrifying picture of a vast mass
of people, taken from above, who have disembarked and are on the
waterfront, standing under the scorching sun. This scene of 20,000
people frozen just at the moment they have finally made it onto dry land
looks positively biblical.
Those years saw a wave of some 100,000 Albanians enter Italy – today
their number stands at about half a million. Since Romania joined the
European Union, there has also been an incoming wave of almost a million
Romanians. Roughly ten per cent of the Romanians are said to be Roma,
the latest scapegoats of Europe's anti-immigration policy. The West
deports them and revokes their residence permits (Italy, France) – in
the East they are fenced into ghettoes, beaten up and murdered
(Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary).
And yet, a mere five or six years ago, foreigners in Italy, and indeed
in Europe, did not pose the problem they do today. Anti-immigration, and
in particular anti-Muslim hysteria, intensified after the publication
of controversial caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, assuming
serious proportions with the onset of the recession in 2008. The people
of Bari were supportive and helpful, because at the end of the
nineteenth century millions of Italy's poor emigrated from the city and
from the province of Puglia to America, the promised land, where in a
matter of two or three generations they became completely assimilated.
Some hundred years later, Italy had become the promised land to some
other immigrants.
Of late, Bari has served as a transit town for immigrants, more for
refugees than for economic immigrants. Accommodated near the airport,
they are part of the latest wave of some forty thousand refugees who
have reached the island of Lampedusa from Tunisia and Libya, following
the political upheavals there. The authorities house the new immigrants
in one of the Reception Centres for Asylum-Seekers (CARA) and then a
commission decides on their fate. Italy has eight such CARA centres,
thirteen Centres for Identification and Expulsion (CIE) and seven
First-Asylum and Identification Centres (CPSA), with only a few
commissions deciding the future of these people. Last summer, Bari was
again cast into the public eye because of the refugees, more precisely
the asylum-seekers from CIE. At the beginning of August, hundreds took
to the streets on the outskirts of town, stopping trains and clashing
with the police. The result was 80 injured and 29 arrests.
I ask my new acquaintances about the incident. Every day at lunch time they gather at a bar, the
Il Borghese,
on the corner of Via de Rossi and Corso Vittorio Emanuele: lawyers
Dario Belluccio and Maria Pia Vigilante from "Giraffe", an organization
that gives legal advice to immigrants; Maddalena Tulanti, the editor of
the local paper
Corriere del Mezzogiorno; social worker Silvana
Serini; Erminia Rizzi from the local Immigrants Advice Bureau. This is a
particularly difficult problem, says Dario, a human rights activist and
one of the few people to have access to the CIE, which is off limits to
both lawyers and journalists. When the Libyans arrived, they came with a
smaller number of people from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso and
some other African countries, who had been working and living in Libya
for years. Under the law, they are not entitled to war refugee status
like the Libyans, but are treated according to their country of origin,
regardless of how long they may have lived and worked in Libya. They
therefore have no chance of obtaining a temporary residence permit on
humanitarian grounds. Not only do their cases take agonizingly long to
resolve, but in the meantime the authorities are treating them like
common criminals. Deprived of contact with the outside, their living
conditions are worse than prison, says Dario. By taking to the street
they were trying to draw attention to their impossible situation.
Among the refugees in Lampedusa are a large number of children. Silvana
looks after unaccompanied minors, in other words parentless child
refugees. She tells me about two brothers, war refugees from
Afghanistan, who came as teenagers. They were illiterate but now are
finishing school and working, she says proudly. Then she takes out the
latest issue of the weekly
l'Espresso; in it there is a report by
Fabrizio Gatti entitled "A Children's Prison", about 225 children and
adolescents imprisoned for months on end, housed with adults at the CPSA
camp in Lampedusa. They live in squalid conditions, without even
minimum care, even though these are traumatized children, some of whom
have not only witnessed the violent deaths of their parents but also
have gone hungry and thirsty for days. In the six months between March
and the end of August 2011, 707 children landed on this island, some of
them mere toddlers or infants, while others were born on Lampedusa
itself. Their situation is even worse and even more uncertain.
Don Angelo, a priest at the church of San Sabino (right next to the city
beach of Pane e Pomadoro), is the best address in town when refugees
need to get help, I'm told. He had just graduated from the seminary when
the Albanians disembarked; he saw them on the waterfront and in the
stadium, where 10,000 people were detained. The authorities released
them only after the intervention of Don Tonino (the well-known pacifist
and bishop Antonio Bello). Don Angelo had also been on humanitarian
missions during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
This tall man with red hair and a disarming smile talks about
"institutional racism", about the reasons for the frustration of the
rioters, who feel that they are utterly discriminated against compared
with the Libyans and Tunisians, even in terms of the colour of their
skin. He confirms Dario's assessment that they live in impossible
conditions, in complete uncertainty as to the length and outcome of the
legal procedure to which they are subject. "Their anger is contagious,
it will spread to other centres. This is no longer a situation where
immigrants gratefully accept a crust of bread, and then keep quiet and
wait. They want an answer." Indeed, even before Bari, embittered by the
way the authorities were treating them, immigrants protested in Mineo,
then in Crotone, but also in the north of Italy. "It's about despair,
not some externally orchestrated revolt. It's incredible that the
authorities don't see that," Don Angelo tells me.
The gulf between the refugees and the authorities is one side of the
coin. But a gulf has also emerged between the locals and the refugees.
The inhabitants of Lampedusa, which is closer to Tunisia than it is to
Sicily and has a population of just over 5,000, initially pulled the
drowning people out of the sea, saving hundreds of lives, and helping
refugees to survive. But last September, by which time no less than
40,000 refugees had come onto the island, things went sour. The locals
turned against the refugees when the latter set fire to the CPSA, the
First-Asylum Centre, where about 1000 refugees were accommodated (far
more than the Centre's actual capacity). They were hoping to force the
authorities to speed up the resolution of their status; some twenty
people were injured in clashes with the police.
The fact is that the government is too slow in keeping its promise
either to transfer them onto the mainland or deport them; and so, after
the rioting, the mayor declared that he would not let a single more
refugee onto the island. As a result, this isolated, neglected island
became a kind of victim itself, a hostage to the authorities'
machinations. Because something had to have gone very wrong for the
locals to switch from solidarity to disgust in a matter of a few months.
Something had to have greatly changed for those same Lampedusans, who
had been the first to reach out and rescue hundreds of drowning
refugees, now to hurl stones at them, shouting "throw them back into the
sea, they're all criminals!" Clearly this small island community, which
lives in difficult conditions itself, cannot carry such a heavy burden
without help from the state.
Emanuele Crialese's film
Terraferma (Dry Land), which won a
special prize at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, is about precisely this
clash between humane principles and the law after a group of refugees
arrive on just such a small, unnamed island. I saw it in Bari a day
after it had premiered. There were only ten of us in the audience at the
18:30 showing. Maybe it was too early for the movies, maybe it was too
hot. Or maybe the viewing audience was so small because the film deals
with a complex issue.
The island is inhabited by fishermen. But since they can't eke out a
living from fishing alone, in the summer they live off of tourism. When
the sea disgorged the first refugees from North Africa onto their
island, it complicated their lives, corroded family relationships and
raised moral dilemmas. The refugees are not only a "bad advertisement"
for this little tourist paradise, they bring the kind of problems the
locals are unused to and cannot understand. One fisherman puts it this
way: "Can it be that the state is prohibiting us from rescuing people
from the sea? All our lives we've done just the opposite, and if this is
how it is now, then our ways are above this law."
"A beautiful, very humane movie," an older gentleman unexpectedly
remarked to me as we were leaving the movie theatre. There were several
films on the subject at Mostra this year, films like Andrea Segra's
Io sono Li, Francesco Patierno's
Cose dell'altro mondo and the great Italian director Ermanno Olmi's
Il villaggio di cartone.
Much is also being written about the problems of immigrants and
refugees, not only by well-known commentators but also by sociologists,
politologists and writers like Gabriele del Grande and Luca Rastello, to
name just two. But the refugees themselves, those who have stayed on in
Italy, are also writing. People like Elvira Mujcic, originally from
Bosnia, and Igiaba Scego, whose parents are from Somalia. In Italy,
there seems to be far greater social and especially artistic awareness
of the refugees and immigrants than is to be found in the official
policy, which favours closing the borders to them.
Many people in Italy still remember the exodus that ravished whole
swathes of the country, especially at the start of the twentieth
century. Italians know that few people leave their country, culture and
language for the sake of pure adventurism. They emigrate out of brute
necessity, usually to escape war or economic poverty, prepared to risk
even their own lives as they set off into the unknown, very much like
today's North African newcomers. In the past 150 years, 18 million
people have emigrated from Italy, a figure equivalent to the population
of a medium-sized European country. Mostly, they went to America, more
than five million of them, which far exceeds, say, the number of Irish
emigrants.
Visiting the Museum of Italian Emigration in Rome, I saw why documenting
emigration (and immigration) is important for the history of a nation,
and for understanding its underlying reasons. Located to the side of the
Il Vittoriano monument, on the Piazza Dell'ara Coeli, the
entrance to the museum is inconspicuous, certainly not a place where you
will see swarms of tourists. No, mostly it's Italians you see here,
walking around, looking at the video archive, the library, the rooms
exhibiting frayed suitcases and yellowed shipping charts, with passenger
lists and identity cards and passports, faded photographs from home,
and the first photographs of arrival in their new, far-away countries
and continents. Perhaps these visitors are remembering their ancestors,
perhaps they are looking for their names on the lists. Letters, diaries,
sports clubs, folklore groups – they all tell individual stories of the
despair and hopes of these impoverished peasants, who left the south
for an unknown world, on their own, some barely fourteen years old. Just
like the desperate of today. This was all just a few generations ago;
there are still people who talk in front of the camera about the drama
of leaving, about relatives or parents standing on the pier, waving
until they become mere dots on the horizon.
As I walked around the museum, I thought of the Haus am Checkpoint
Charlie in Berlin. There you can see the many different ways that the
East Germans tried to escape to West Berlin, ringed by a 140
kilometre-long wall. Some of these attempts were quite incredible, from
flying with a balloon to digging a tunnel under the wall, smuggling
people in the trunk of a car or swimming the Baltic Straits.
At the beginning of the movie
Terraferma, a flimsy overcrowded
boat sinks and all that is left floating on the water are letters,
photographs, documents, toothbrushes... Shouldn't such items be
collected as symbols of identity and exhibited in a similar museum
dedicated to the refugees of North Africa? Shouldn't it collect
testimonies to the ordeals of those who suffocated on deck, who drank
urine just to survive, who threw living people over the railings? That,
of course, would be a museum dedicated to suffering. But it is something
the refugees deserve, wherever they may come from.
So I was glad when, not even a week later, I spotted a small news item
in an Italian newspaper: "Pieces of wood, family photographs, pages from
the Quran, shoes, food boxes, music cassettes... items salvaged from
the sea or left behind on the boats that carry thousands of immigrants
across the Mediterranean every year, all this can be found in a small
room, ten square metres in size, which forms the heart of the museum of
immigration set up in Lampedusa by volunteers of the
Askavusa association." It was founded by a local artist, Giacomo Sferlazzo, in the hope that others would join the initiative.
You can also find immigration figures at Museum of Italian Emigration.
Italy has 3,891,295 immigrants, accounting for 6.5 per cent of the
population. Caritas Migrantes gives different figures: roughly five
million immigrants or 7 per cent of the population. Interestingly – and
this was confirmed by many of the people I met – Islamophobia is not
prevalent here and fear of Muslims is not used as a means of propaganda
as it is in the north of the continent. However, activists like Don
Angelo and some journalists caution that a different kind of
generalization is at work – both the law and the media criminalize
refugees as a group. By and large, the authorities treat them like
common criminals, even though they have done nothing to deserve it. This
is one of the reasons why they are protesting. And even that is a
problem, because Europe is still not used to refugees protesting.
Europeans expect only gratitude.
Public television plays an especially interesting role in the policy of fear. Citing research conducted by Demos&Pi,
La Repubblica
writes that in the first four months of 2011, news about immigrants
accounted in Italy for 13.9 per cent of news programs on TG1. For the
sake of comparison, this figure stands in France at 1.6 per cent on
France 2 television and in Germany at 0.6 per cent on ARD. It is worth
noting, however, that Italy was experiencing a so-called "invasion" of
immigrants at the time. All the same, the heavy news coverage did not
have a decisive impact on the viewing audience. According to the same
source, only six per cent of Italians cited immigrants as their main
concern, compared to 55 per cent who cited the cost of living. "This
goes to show how the sense of insecurity is a political and media
'construction', which introduces and stokes 'fear of others' and
increases the already present feeling of insecurity that exists for
economic and (un)employment reasons," writes author Ilvo Diamanti.
There are numerous humanitarian and civic organizations, such as
Fortress Europe, that advocate the rights of immigrants and offer them
very tangible assistance. These organizations believe that immigrants
will keep coming regardless of increasingly restrictive, and even
immoral, legislation; regardless of the walls erected and the other
obstacles awaiting them. Because where they come from things are even
worse. Immigration policy should, therefore, be rational rather than
based on fear, because the only ones to profit from the latter are
politicians and parties that promise the impossible. Fear of immigrants
is the yeast on which they grow.
In Rome, refugees live behind the Termini train station, in a part of
town known as Esquilino. I realized how different Esquilino is from
other neighbourhoods in when I took a walk down Via Carlo Alberto toward
the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. There I saw something that I last saw
maybe fifty years ago in Yugoslavia: a street knife-grinder. The
dark-skinned young man was hunched over a big whetstone, sharpening a
knife for a woman leaning against a doorway, smoking, waiting for him to
finish. They were speaking in Romanian.
This is where my friend Alessandra lives. Admittedly, you can't see the
crowds in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele from the big balcony of her top,
fifth-floor apartment. The piazza is ringed with shops selling all and
sundry, not that there seem to be many buyers. The shops are mostly
owned by the Chinese. But as soon as she walks out of her building,
Alessandra finds herself surrounded by people from different continents,
of different colour, speaking different languages. She took in a little
boy from Cameroon, but after a few years his mother took him back.
Looking at David's photograph on her desk, I think of the difference
between Europe and the States: had he been in America instead of Italy,
this same little boy would have become American. In Italy neither he,
nor indeed his offspring, will ever be Italian, citizens of Italy. But
his white peers, whose parents come from Albania or Bosnia, will become
Italian, as will their progeny.
Alessandra is a psychologist and works as a volunteer on projects that
help immigrants adjust to and integrate into their new environment, by
learning the language, going to school and finding a job. The Fund for
the Social Inclusion of Immigrants supports a whole range of these
programs and activities. Alessandra shows me a book and DVD called
La meta di me
(Half of me), the product of one project that focused on the second
generation, the children of immigrants. There are plenty of such
initiatives. Experience tells her that most of this generation will
remain in Italy and that they need to be given a chance to become equal
citizens as soon as possible. She thinks that immigration policy is all
wrong. The law allowing immigrants to be joined by their families has
been abolished, so that most economic immigrants and war refugees are
young men, who wind up facing a whole slew of problems, from depression
to alcoholism, drug addiction and crime. They have no motivation and no
goal. Brute survival is not enough of an incentive. Alessandra referred
to something I had heard mentioned before – the experience of Italians
in the United States. When you give people an opportunity to establish
themselves in a society, they usually take it. To be sure, the American
melting-pot offers a different model of integration; but equally, says
Alessandra, immigration policy should be based both on the principle of
solidarity and humaneness, and on the principle of mutual benefit.
One example of mutual benefit is Elvira Mujcic, a young woman who was
not even thirteen when she came to Italy as a refugee from Srebrenica. A
high school and college graduate, today she is a successful young
Italian writer – for it is in Italian that she writes. As we lunch on
melanzane alla parmiggianna
in a little restaurant in Via del Boschetto, we talk about identity.
She sees no contradiction between her Bosnian origins and the fact that
she writes in Italian; indeed, she speaks it better than her mother
tongue, which, in the course of our conversation, she periodically
apologies for. Identity is not some rigid mould you fall into or not. On
the contrary, we talk about how the one, let's say Bosnian, does not
rule out the other, Italian. She loves Bosnian food, but she loves the
Italian language. She no longer wants to live in her birthplace, and
it's not just because there is no work in Bosnia. She feels that she
belongs here: this is where she went to school, where she lives and
works, where she loves.
Still, it was easier for her to assimilate as a refugee because she is
European. It is harder for those around the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele,
especially if they come from other cultures and other continents. But
even here there are success stories. Take the interesting story of the
Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio.
Today it is quite well-known, with three albums under its belt, some
three hundred concerts worldwide and a documentary film. It embraces
musicians from Tunisia, Brazil, Cuba, America, Hungary, Ecuador,
Argentina, Senegal, India and, of course, Italy – but its composition
changes. The orchestra was formed in 2002 by conductor Mario Tronco as
part of a project to help save the
Apollo movie theatre.
Even more interesting than the story of the orchestra's formation is the
kind of music it plays. In Rome one evening I managed to get a ticket
to their premier of
The Magic Flute at the Teatro Olimpia. Rome's
leftist, progressive elite was in attendance that evening – I
recognized a number of well-known public figures – because it was simply
an event not to be missed. A casual visitor to the auditorium, who knew
nothing about either the orchestra or the opera, would have seen it as
part concert, part opera. They played a mixture of classical and
ethno-music, jazz, pop, rap, reggae and mamba. Every so often, in
between the Tunisian singer and the solo sections on the Arab lute and
African instruments such as the kora, djembe, dumduma and sabara, you
could hear excerpts from The Magic Flute, such popular arias as the
Queen of the Night, Papageno, Sarastro, Pamino. This "opera" is
performed in six languages: Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, German, English
and Wolof. Not even the story follows the libretto and the ending comes
as a complete surprise... Admittedly, this is not a
performance
of the opera. Even the poster warns us that it is an interpretation:
"The Magic Flute according to the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio". Mario
Tronco himself says that this is not about faithfully performing
Mozart's piece: "We took great liberties with the score, we chose only
what suits our orchestra. Our performance is full of references to other
cultures. Our musicians come from far away, and I don't mean just
geographically. Each one of them brings to this opera his or her own
culture, own language..." Tronco says that while Mozart's opera is about
"how it once was", the Orchestra's performance is about "how it will
one day be".
And indeed, that opening night was for me as if the orchestra had
cracked open the door to Europe's future. Mozart's music lies at the
very heart of what we see as Europe's cultural heritage. Most Europeans
would probably like to hear them give a pitch-perfect performance of the
original, because that would be proof of integration. This
interpretation/adaptation/improvisation on the theme of Mozart, however
well-performed and interesting, sounds blasphemous to their ears. But it
is more likely that non-European immigrants will also bring something
of their own to Europe, and that we will increasingly be faced with a
mixture of cultures, be it with Mozart or any other holy of European
holies.
This interpretation showed that newcomers from other cultures will not
necessarily completely adapt to our dominant culture, which is what they
are expected to do, but will try to adapt the culture they encounter,
in all its elements, to their own. And they will do so in both the arts
and in life. Statistics will be the decisive factor here: with the
number of immigrants from Africa and Asia growing, it may not be that
just food, music, fashion and customs will undergo change – European
laws may do so too. Yet very few people in Europe will openly say today:
Yes, that's true, so what?
It seems that to talk about the integration and assimilation of
immigrants (the only two models ever discussed) makes sense only up to a
point – only when it concerns newcomers from Europe, say eastern
Europe, such as Albanians or Bosnians, but not when it concerns Roma,
who come from the same part of the world but do not share the same
culture or history. But what about the non-European immigrants pouring
in from the south, via Lampedusa, Sicily, the Spanish coast, and from
the east, from Afghanistan via the Turkish-Greek-Bulgarian border, where
the largest number come from? Europeans, be they pro or contra
immigration, agree on the civilizational bottom-line that newcomers,
especially from different cultures, must not cross – the emancipation of
women, respect for human rights, democracy. But what about art, which,
by definition, breaches all boundaries?
Maybe it is better to be aware of how the greats like Mozart, Bach and
Beethoven might sound in the future. But also of how many other
traditions that we hold dear will change, if they haven't already. Take
the production of Murano glass. The little island of Murano, famous for
its glass since the end of the thirteenth century, presents a sorry
picture today. Most of its factories have closed. The jewellery,
figurines, bowls, lamps, paper holders, and stoppers that are sold
massively in hundreds of Venice's souvenir shops are made in China. Yes,
you get a certificate saying that the necklace you bought is Murano
glass, but more likely than not it is Murano glass
Made in China.
The ordinary tourist won't notice the difference or even wonder how the
little island he visited the day before, where glass is not mass
produced, can churn out such a vast amount of souvenirs. Or how such a
wonderful glass ring or bracelet can cost just a few euros. And most
importantly, how the vast majority of these items are identical, that is
mass-produced. Because, on the little island of Murano, no two items
made by hand can be the same. That's one distinction; their fine
workmanship is the other.
I had a chance to see this for myself in a shop behind my apartment, on
the corner of Calle Fiubero. Andrea, who works there, took me to the
studio and showed me all sorts of objects, from a paper holder to lovely
jewellery. They say it is hard to distinguish the Murano made originals
from their Chinese copies. On the Internet you can find warnings and
information about how to tell the difference, but you can also find
advertisements for Murano glass manufactured in China. Of course, this
is nonsense, since Murano is the name not just of a certain glass-making
technique, but also of the glass objects made in Murano. Andrea picked
up two bracelets. One was of precise, flawless workmanship; the other, I
could see with a bit of effort, was a crude, approximate Chinese
imitation. Mass tourism has led to a demand that Murano cannot meet,
even when working at full capacity. And, as Andrea says, the Chinese
have neither the same understanding of the original nor any moral
dilemmas about producing imitations. But what upset me most was when he
compared the
millefiori pearl necklace made in Murano with the
one from China. Because that was when I sadly realized that the necklace
I had bought in another shop the previous day was a common or garden
fake!
The "danger of invasion", as European politicians are wont to
exaggerate, lies not only in the number of immigrants (after all, there
are only around 200,000 Chinese in Italy, and roughly 2,000 in Venice),
but also in the investment of money and buying up of property. Money is
much faster in bringing change than immigrants. First the Chinese in
Venice bought up small shops and turned them into "Murano" glass
souvenir and leatherwear shops. Then they bought bars and restaurants;
now they are following up with palazzos, turning them into hotels.
One evening, as I was taking the
vaporetto no. 2 from Ponte
dell'Academia to the San Marco stop on the Riva delgi schiavoni, I
noticed that entire sections on this part of the Grand Canal were
without light. Huge palaces were steeped in darkness, as if nobody lived
there. These are the summer residences of the rich. But among them are
also palaces that belong to the city and that the city is selling off,
explained a friend of mine who lives here. Because change comes in many
ways, not just with the poor wretches who make it in one piece to
Lampedusa or some other patch of Italian soil; not just through food,
fashion, custom and music, but also via banks, investments,
money-laundering, corruption of the local administration. And while
Europeans ponder future changes and whether to put up a wall around
Europe (if only they knew what its boundaries were), while they
contemplate measures that will contain immigrants at that same imaginary
border and Europe's culture and the values that need to be preserved
(although globalization, in other words Americanization, has already
utterly changed them), the Chinese are freely investing, buying palaces
in Venice in order to turn them into hotels, thus making even more money
out of Europe's cultural treasures. From the Venetian viewpoint, in
comparison with the investments of the Chinese – nota bene, some people
here call it money-laundering – fear of Muslim immigrants in France and
Germany and further north looks almost pathetic.
My neighbour says that Venice is increasingly turning not into a museum,
as I romantically thought, but a Disneylandish amusement park owned by
the Chinese, who alone profit from it. He is probably right. Be it at a
slow pace or fast, legally or illegally, with or without money, as
refugees or otherwise – the immigrants are coming. As I leave Venice
with my fake Murano necklace, listening to the Orchestra di Piazza
Vittorio, I try to imagine what Mozart would sound like if it were
adapted, not performed, by a Chinese orchestra in the Teatro Fenice in
the not so distant future.
This article is a part of the international project "Mirrors of
Europe", a series of literary reportages by authors from numerous
European countries coordinated by the association Project Forum in
Bratislava in cooperation with Eurozine.