This essay, entitled “Migrazioni”, was published in La Bustina Di Minerva in 1990
Last Tuesday, while all the newspapers were dedicating numerous articles
to the tense events in Florence, there appeared in La Repubblica a
cartoon by Bucchi: it showed two silhouettes, an enormous Africa looming
over a miniscule Italy; next to it was a Florence that was represented
only by a small dot. The caption was: “Where do we want more police?”
Meanwhile, the Corriere della Sera summed up the story of the climactic
changes on our planet over the last six thousand years. From this
review it emerged that the fertility or the aridity of a continent
inspired vast migrations that changed the face of the planet and created
the civilizations that today we know, experience directly or study
through history.Today, with regards to the so-called problems of
the “foreigners” (a gracious euphemism that, as has already been noted,
must also include the Swiss and the tourists from Texas), an issue that
is of interest to all of the nations of Europe, we continue to reason
as if we find ourself facing a phenomenon of immigration. One has
immigration when some hundreds of thousands of citizens of one
overpopulated country want to go to live in another country, (for
example, the Italians in Australia). And it is natural that the hosting
country must regulate the flow of immigration according to its ability
to incorporate them, which is why it has the right to arrest or expel
those immigrants that prove criminal, just as it has to arrest its own
criminal citizens who rob the rich tourists carrying their precious
valuables.But today, in Europe, we do not find ourselves facing a
phenomenon of immigration. We find ourselves facing a phenomenon of
migration. To be sure, it does not have the violent and sweeping aspect
of the Germanic invasions in Italy, France and Spain, it does not have
the virulence of the Arab expansions following the Hegira, nor the
slowness of the imprecise flows that carried the dark peoples from Asia
to Polynesia and perhaps to America. But it is another chapter in the
story of the planet that has seen civilizations form and dissolve on the
waves of the great migratory flows, first from the West to the East
(but we know very little about that), after from the East to the West
beginning with the millennial movement of the surge from the Indus to
the Pillars of Hercules, (the straights of Gibraltar), and afterwards in
the fourth century from the Pillars of Hercules to California and
Tierra del Fuego, (Argentina and Patagonia).Now the migration,
unnoticed because it comes in the guise of an airplane trip and a stop
at the immigration office at the police headquarters, or perhaps by a
clandestine boat, comes to the North from an arid and hungry South. It
feels like an immigration, but it is a migration, a historic event of
incalcuable scope. They do not travel in such a horde that the grass
will no longer grow where their horses have trampled, but in discrete
clusters that attract little notice, nevertheless, the process will not
take centuries or millenia but decades. And like all the great
migrations, it will finally result in a rearrangement of the ethnicity
of the land of their destination, an inexorable change of costumes, an
unarrestable hybridization that noticeably mutates the color of the
skin, the hair and the eyes of the population, as even a small number of
Normans left behind their blond hair and blue eyes in Sicily.The
great migrations, at least in historic periods, were feared: at first
they tried to avoid them, the Roman emperors erected one rampart here
and another one there, they sent the legions ahead to defeat the
advancing intruders, after they came to bargain and discipline the first
settlements, therefore offering Roman citizenship to all the subjects
of the Empire, but in the end, the ruin of the Romans formed the
so-called romano-barbarian kingdoms that were the origins of our
European countries, of the languages that we jealously speak today, of
our political and social institutions. When on the Lombardian highway,
we find places that we call, in Italian fashion names like Usmate or
Biandrate, we have forgotten that they were descendants of the
Longobards. On the other hand, from where do we get those Etruscan
Smiles we find so often in central Italy?The great migrations cannot be stopped. We simply must prepare ourselves to live in a new season of Afro-European culture.