Domenico Lucano, a 51-year-old man, is the mayor of Riace, Italy.
The village – with its three churches, two patron saints, sheep
grazing on the surrounding hillsides and tangerine trees growing in the
valleys – is like a corn on the sole of the foot of the Calabria
region.
Until recently, Riace was rapidly becoming a ghost town. People had
left to find their luck elsewhere – in Milan, Turin or Genoa, in
Germany or the United States. Riace’s population had shrunk so
drastically that the village didn’t even have a bar, a restaurant or a
butcher’s shop, and there weren’t enough children to fill classes in
the school. That was before Mayor Lucano decided to revive his village:
with immigrants from Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and
Lebanon.
It all began with a ship. The boat arrived 12 years ago, on July 1,
1998. Lucano, who was a teacher at the time, was driving along the
coastal road when he saw a large group of people wading toward the
shore. They were Kurdish refugees, 300 men and women, and a few
children, stranded on a beach near his native village.
It was the same spot where two bronze statues had been found under
the sea in 1972, putting Riace on the map. For Lucano, it was a sign.
“The wind has brought us a special cargo, and who are we to turn it
away?” The Greeks once sailed across the Mediterranean to Calabria,
followed by the Arabs and the Normans – and now the refugees were
coming.
Global Village
Lucano welcomed the Kurds into his village, earning him the nickname
“Mimmo the Kurd”. Other refugees followed, the flotsam of wars and
poverty around the world. He decided to create a place where the
refugees and local inhabitants could work and live side-by-side – a
global village, in the poorest corner of one of Italy’s poorest
regions, a land of shattered dreams. He established an association and
gave it an ambitious name: Citta Futura (“City of the Future”).
Europe’s population is shrinking, and Italy now has one of the
lowest birthrates on the continent. Lucano believes that he may have
found a way to bring growth to Europe once again. His approach is to
resettle refugees in places where the population is shrinking. He
reasons that in areas where the population is already in decline, fears
of overpopulation are less likely to surface.
Lucano set up his office in the Palazzo Pinnaro, an extravagant name
for an ordinary house. Even though he has been mayor for the past six
years, Lucano still works in the same office at his worn wooden desk,
surrounded by maps of the world, a pastel drawing of Che Guevara and a
poster depicting Mexican Zapatista rebels. He is a small man with big
dreams and a favorite word: utopia. He is not a member of any political
party, and when he ran for office, his campaign was based on nothing
but a simple idea: The poorest of the poor would save Riace and, in
return, Riace would save them. He won the election.
Since then, Lucano has accommodated refugees in empty houses in the
medieval village center, where they are given free room and board,
electricity included. In return, they are expected to learn Italian and
work. The women make handicrafts and the men renovate houses that are
then rented out to tourists.
Helen from Ethiopia, eight months’ pregnant when she arrived by
boat, weaves Calabrian fabrics out of high-quality wool. Mohammed from
Iraq, persecuted by the Mahdi militias, now sells kebabs and works in
construction. Shukri, a petite Somali woman, is 23 but looks 13, and
has two children. She works as a glassblower, making glass butterflies.
Reversing Decline
There are now 220 immigrants living in Riace as well as the 1,600
Riacesi, as the village residents are called. The mayor hopes that the
population will eventually return to its previous level of 3,000
people. The new residents are opening shops and sending their children
to the local school, and tourists are now coming to Riace to buy the
handicrafts they make. “A place that people were once leaving has now
become a place of welcoming,” Lucano says proudly.
A few weeks ago, when African fruit pickers, who earn €25 ($35) a
day, staged a protest in nearby Rosarno, villagers responded by
shooting at them and beating them with metal bars. After the incident,
Lucano said in a television interview that Riace would welcome the
immigrants. A short time later, three young men from Guinea, hardly
more than boys, showed up at his door, one with a gunshot wound in his
hip. Lucano explained the rules to the Guineans: They would receive €2
a day in spending money, plus €500 for a month of work. The boys were
stunned. It seemed like a miracle.
It does sound almost too good to be true, but the concept seems to
work. Lucano has won over the older people in the village, who were
afraid of the immigrants, and the young people, who were worried that
they would take away their jobs. Citta Futura is already the biggest
employer in the village, both for refugees and local residents.
Mafia Reaction
There is one group, however, that doesn’t like the fact that it no
longer calls the shots or is able to collect money in Riace: the
Calabrian Mafia. Its thugs poisoned Lucano’s three dogs and fired two
bullets into the door of the Donna Rosa tavern. But for Lucano, it is a
compliment, a sign that he has done his job well. Two neighboring
villages have already adopted Lucano’s approach, and the regional
government in Calabria enacted a law that will allow even more villages
to follow suit. Politicians are making pilgrimages to Riace, and last
fall German filmmaker Wim Wenders even paid a visit to the village.
Wenders had intended to make a film about boat refugees, but it
ended up being a 27-minute, semi-documentary, semi-Hollywood film, shot
in 3-D, mostly about Riace and its new residents. The film is called
“Il Volo” (“The Flight”).
A short time later, Wenders gave a speech in Berlin, where
celebrations to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the
Berlin Wall had just ended. “The true utopia is not the fall of the
Wall, but what has been achieved in Calabria, in Riace,” he said.
Lucano had the Wenders quote printed on his New Year’s cards, which
he sent around the world. He hopes that the miracle of Riace will
spread elsewhere.
Intellpuke: The mayor of Riace is on to something here, and it certainly sounds like it is working well for his village.
