Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
As will be made evident from the accounts of the interviewees, their integration
into a part of Italy that is, on average, wealthier than the rest of the
country, had consequences for the lives of the refugees. The move has both
affected them materially, thus influencing their plans (of returning to
Kosovo, for instance), and has altered their image of Kosovo today.
On the routes a great number of these interviewees have taken to reach
these areas, large cities appear only occasionally, like unexplored paths.
They were always used as transit points and perceived with some suspicion.
The immigrants saw Turin, for example, through their visit to the
Questura [police headquarters] and emergency shelter, while Milan, for
them, was seen from the inside of the Central Railway station, a place
peopled by derelicts, the homeless, immigrants and refugees.
With the exception of a boy residing in Turin, who spoke to me in a café,
all of the interviews took place in the homes of the subjects. The talks were
held in a welcoming and hospitable atmosphere, sometimes made pleasantly
untidy by the presence of elders, children and adolescents. In Ivrean
homes, there was a constant coming-and-going of men, boys and girls
going to work or coming home, the coffee pot was always simmering on
the kitchen stove and freshly-opened cigarette packs, handed around the
table, became the cue for conversation. The homes in Lecco extended the
same kindness and hospitality. In one home, the Albanian national flag had
been draped over a table and used as a tablecloth, while in another house,
pictures of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, of the Virgin Mary, and pennants
of the Albanian eagle on a red background, were hung on the walls and set
among the ornaments on the sideboards and shelves.
The itineraries of those who had arrived in the provinces of north-western
Italy from Kosovo had not been attempted without safety provisions. First,
the richly networked fabric of the community, tried and tested by the wave
of immigrants in the 1990s and by the arrival of refugees from the former
Yugoslavia, remained strong and was almost everywhere able to guarantee
real opportunities of integration to the arriving refugees. The contribution
of this already fertile ground of autonomous networks, (set up by Kosovar
Albanian immigrants who had been in Italy since the early 1990s), to the
integration of new immigrants, must not be underestimated. In the Lecco
area, in particular, these networks have proven to be especially wellorganized,
swift in giving assistance, and able to handle any emergency
with the help of local communities, thus facilitating the reception of the
arrivals. Despite this, there were and still are many former immigrants
preparing to leave again, intent on joining relatives living in northern
Europe.
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