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June 25, 2008
Abroad
Italy Gives Cultural Diversity a Lukewarm Embrace
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/ar...r=1&ref=travel

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
ROME — An exhibition of art from India was being installed here the other morning, at the Luigi Pigorini Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography. Beyond the mah-jongg, Chinese music and Andean ritual dancing displays, Putli Ganju; Juliette Fatima Imam; and Juliette’s mother, Philomina Tirkey Imam, were hanging their paintings of animals and fish.

“You’re not my type,” the elder Ms. Imam said. She was explaining the meaning behind her work — simple, hieratic and airy — of a bird turning away from a deer. Ms. Ganju’s scene of jungle life, next to it, was more elaborate, with curlicues and filigree.

“We’re from different tribes,” Ms. Imam said, “and in her case everything is mixed up, and in mine everything is separate.”

Ms. Ganju, a small, silent woman wearing a colorful sari, smiled benignly.

Europe, for all its diversity, can be remarkably provincial. The latest Italian government came to power two months ago on a platform promising to crack down on illegal foreigners, who immigration opponents here say are associated with crime. Last month the Italian police arrested hundreds of migrants living in shantytowns. Vigilantes attacked Gypsy encampments near Naples in May after reports of a 16-year-old Gypsy girl’s trying to steal a baby.

All across Europe attitudes are stiffening toward immigration, nowhere more so than here. About eight million illegal immigrants are estimated to live in the European Union. This past week the union’s parliament passed tough rules for expelling and detaining them. And here, the far right wing of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s new government has just proposed one of the strictest anti-immigration laws on the Continent, provoking heated opposition from human-rights organizations, the Vatican, the United Nations and also Italian prosecutors fearing courts swamped by criminal cases.

But with plummeting birth rates and an aging populace, Italy can hardly survive now without foreign laborers. Albanians and Romanians care for the elderly. Indians working in Emilia-Romagna tend the cows producing the milk for Parmesan cheese.

The problem is that fears about crime by immigrants, inflamed by the news media and populist politicians, have combined with one of the largest waves of foreigners in Europe. The Northern League, a political party that once advocated the secession of Italy’s north, joined Mr. Berlusconi’s ruling coalition this spring after distributing posters around cities like Siena showing an American Indian next to a warning that Italians will end up, as the Indians did, penned into reservations if they don’t stop immigrants from taking over the country.

Here in Rome the first conservative mayor in years, Gianni Alemanno, won on a similar platform that advocated being tough on crime and illegal immigration. He has said almost nothing about culture and the arts, except that he would be cutting funds to the city’s summer festival. Nobody can remember the last time an incoming mayor of Rome had entered office without some big, unaffordable cultural scheme.

Rome, an ancient magnet for foreigners, is naturally more integrated than most Italian cities and, unlike most of the country, it has taken at least a few steps in recent years to come to terms with its multicultural reality, among them instituting a public library program to reach immigrants and provide Romans with books and lectures about foreign cultures. The question now is whether such efforts will continue.

“We always thought of ourselves as a monoculture, but immigration is our present and future,” said Franco Pittau, an official of Caritas, a Roman Catholic social service and development association that, among other things, monitors immigration here.

Franca Eckert Coen echoed that remark. An Italian Jew in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city who lives in an apartment filled with Jewish art, she was in charge of multicultural policy under the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Ms. Coen recalled a year when Chinese celebrated their New Year with dragons around the Day of Epiphany.

“The newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity,” she said. “So we held a public event on the Campidoglio about Chinese culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade each year.”

“It was the same with the Sikhs,” she added. “We had a public event after 2001. We also organized tours of the Capitoline Museums for immigrants. Then we asked them to do something. The Poles, for example, had someone play Polish music at the museum.”

“Little things,” she called them. “They can overcome big fears. I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Culture is crucial to give people here a chance to see that to be foreign is to bring a different ethnic life to the city, that diversity is a positive.”

Italian culture certainly isn’t diverse now. It subsists on an all-white, all-native, monoethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and Italian pop music. Even Roman schoolchildren no longer stray far from a spaghetti-with-ragú diet now that an intercultural city program to serve one international-themed lunch a month has been abandoned by the new center-right government, heeding some Italian mothers, who doubted the nutritional value of falafel and curry.

People here remember the last time the Italian government promised to deal with illegal foreigners, in 2002. Expulsions, 45,000 that year, dropped to 23,000 by 2006, while 640,000 new immigrants were legalized as part of the largest one-time legalization in the history of Europe. You could say that Italy, in its paradox, is going through the sort of culture shock the United States experienced a century ago, when millions of Italians, among others, immigrated to America. Romanians now make up the fastest-growing immigrant population here. There were 75,000 at the end of 2001. Since then, hundreds of thousands have arrived.

Romanians also account for 5.7 percent of the prison population. More than a third of all prisoners in Italy are foreigners. Foreigners are charged with 68 percent of rapes, 32 percent of thefts.

Politicians and the news media have latched onto this connection, trumpeting calamities like the murder last fall of a 47-year-old Italian woman, Giovanna Reggiani, near a Gypsy shantytown, leading to a spate of anti-Gypsy racism. But, in fact, crime overall has not risen since 1991. Thefts have gone up, but murders are down, to 620 last year, from 1,695 in 1990.

Gabriella Sanna directs a multicultural library program here, which was started on a shoestring budget of about $120,000 in 1997. Today it survives on less, she said. It began by collecting Italian translations of world fiction and other foreign books and organizing school visits by first- and second-generation immigrants to teach Italian children about different cultures.

Then, as the immigrant population boomed, it started buying books in Romanian, Polish, Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Chinese. Foreign-language sections opened in nearly a dozen libraries where immigrants lived. Some 8 percent of foreigners, Ms. Sanna estimated, now use the public libraries in Rome.

She was diplomatic when the conversation turned to the recent election and whether her program would survive. “This is a new experience for us because we’ve always worked in a favorable climate,” Ms. Sanna said. Her dour expression suggested she wasn’t optimistic.

Across town, at the Indian art show, where the three artists discussed their work, the museum was empty. It occupies a sunny Modernist marvel from the late Fascist days on the outskirts of the city center. The place, devoted to foreign cultures, is splendid but underfinanced and underappreciated. Roman schoolchildren are dragged there on class trips, then fail ever to go back. Their parents, if asked about the last time they visited, look like guilty relatives reminded of a kindly aunt they haven’t checked on in years.

Ms. Imam’s daughter, in her 20s, the most Westernized of the three Indian women, hearing her two elder colleagues describe their pictures, piped in. “I learned from my mother and from Putli,” she said. More complicated than the others, her painting suggested a melting pot. It was full of shapes and figures. At the center were two birds, entwined.

She gazed at them, letting the message sink in.

“Two birds,” she said. “In India, we say if you see two birds together, it is good luck.”