And thirty years ago Albania landed in Bari- time.news

by time news
from GIAN ANTONIO STELLA

The ship “Vlora” with twenty thousand migrants on board landed in Puglia. The massive influx of migrants aroused fears and apprehensions of which time has done justice, however

“I limousine!” Shouted that day in the unlikely crowd, mad with joy, one of the soaked Albanian boys who risking their necks had lowered themselves into the sea to reach the quay of the port of Bari. “I limousine!”. That was his dream. Get rid of tattered clothes and broken shoes, find someone to give him a hand, make a fortune, buy a nice car to show one day on his return to his Land of Eagles

A disproportionate dream. Of those who had seen clandestinely (it was very forbidden) too many episodes of the most cheerful and light-hearted Italian TV type Drive-in, Those of the night, TeleMike, and he was under the illusion that Italy was the land of a lot of money where by snapping your fingers, with a little luck, you could make a lot of money. A bit like our grandparents who believed that the streets of New York, wrote Charles Dickens, were paved with gold.

It was August 8, 1991. And that day thirty years ago the sudden and impactful appearance of the Vlora, covered by a carpet of over twenty thousand men, women, children who had seized the ship in Durres to be landed in Puglia, marked an epochal turning point for Italy. The definitive transition from a country of emigration, from which over 27 million people had left in a century and a half, to a country of strong immigration. Of course, the “technical” turning point (one less emigrant leaving, one more arriving) had already been around for about fifteen years. And already in March of that 1991 five ships and a dozen boats had arrived in Brindisi for a total of 23,000 immigrants in a city of 80,000 inhabitants who, read in the eyes of the Albanians, the hunger, the hope, the confusion of those who came out of a Country reduced for forty-one years in poverty under the Buro-Communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, they had gone out of their way to help everyone. Remaining, however, disturbed: there were too many, all together. There Vlora, then, it was a whip.

In January, the first reports from Tirana, including one of the Rai of Isabella Stasi Castriota Scanderbeg (who bore in the surname itself the secular link with the Albanian national hero Giorgio Castriota Scanderbeg, killed in 1468 after having tried in vain to oppose the conquest of the Turks), had shown a Albania exhausted. A pair of shoes cost a week of work, a suit a month (70,000 Italian lire at the time, 68 euros plus change today), a television for six months. The reforms of the heirs of the Communist despot, despite six years since his death, had been so timid that only one private restaurant had been opened, plus a few kebab stallholders. Released after twenty-six years in prison for crimes of opinion, the dissident writer Fatos Lubonja lived huddled with the rest of his family “in his grandfather’s old house”, a former official once loyal to the regime: “We all lived together: my uncle with his wife in a room; his son in another room with three children and his wife; my father and mother in the third room; my brother with his wife and two children, in the hallway of the house, closed as a room. There was no room for me and my family, so we settled in the cellar. In all we were 17 ». They considered themselves lucky. Others were worse off.

Italy, for the Albanians, was a natural choice. It was as close by sea as Venice to Grado, it had a per capita GDP of 21,956 US dollars (World Bank data) against 336 of the Albanians, but above all our South had a strong community since the 15th century arbëreshë refugee on our coasts after the Turkish conquest of Albania. A very strong bond. To the point that one of the greatest poets in the Albanian language was Girolamo De Rada and the Italian Risorgimento saw the Albanians among the protagonists. Era arbëreshë the irredentist Agesilao Milano who attempted the life of the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies Ferdinand II, arbëreshë the future leader of the historical left Francesco Crispi, arbëreshë the lieutenant of Giuseppe Garibaldi Domenico Damis, arbëreshë the high school students of the Albanian college of San Demetrio Corone, who enthusiastically joined in waving the tricolor as the Garibaldi soldiers passed towards Naples.

The fact is that the newcomers, swooped en masse and in that way in our country were for a large part of the Italians a shock. They did not seem to come from a few nautical miles, but from a miserable Italy of the century before, the one described by Stefano Jacini inParliamentary inquiry into misery: “In the valleys of the Alps and the Apennines, and also in the plains, especially in Southern Italy, and even in some of the best-cultivated provinces of Upper Italy, there are hovels where in a single smoky room devoid of air and light live together men, goats, pigs and poultry. And such hovels number perhaps in the hundreds of thousands ». An ancient and violent Italy seen from the “new” with fear. And I refuse.

So much so that the government of Giulio Andreotti, the seventh in the series, saw no alternative but to throw as many Albanians back as possible back to where they came from. The initial relationship was very tiring. And over the years it would also be exacerbated by the unforgivable errors of so many immigrants who, miserable, anarchoids and maddened by a dictatorship isolated from the world, where every law reeked of abuse and injustice, often seemed to resist respecting the most elementary rules. Up to hate campaigns that culminated in a slogan of the Northern League player Marco Formentini at the 1997 Municipal Councils: “One more vote in Formentini, one less Albanian in Milan”. In short, for a few years it fell to the children of the Land of Eagles all the insults, curses and most infamous accusations that a century earlier had been launched by the Swiss, British, French, American and Australian xenophobes against those grandparents of ours who had done more struggling to enter the countries to which they had emigrated.

Thirty years after that unforgettable landing, the numbers themselves (successful entrepreneurs, VAT numbers, university students, Italian passports, remittances abroad, presence in prisons dropped to 11% …) are enough to say how much the Albanians have laboriously managed to fit into the Italian reality better of others. And to gradually disprove many of the old stereotypes. What happened to that boy who dreamed of the limousine we do not know. But maybe, who knows, it went well for him too.

Ties


When Albania was conquered by the Turks in the 15th century, many refugees who had come from that country moved to Italy, where they integrated themselves profitably, forming communities
arbëreshë. Of Albanian origin was for example the Sicilian leader Francesco Crispi (1818-1901) who was among the organizers of the enterprise of the Thousand and then was president of the Council of the Kingdom of Italy on two occasions, first between 1887 and 1891, then between 1893 and 1896. Promoter of colonial expansion, he was forced to resign after the defeat of Adua Di ceppo Albanese on his father’s side was also Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), leader of the Communist Party of Italy imprisoned by fascism, author of those Prison Notebooks that have been translated and studied all over the world

August 6, 2021 (change August 6, 2021 | 22:16)

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