Albanians in Italy thirty years later. They were not “invaders”

Leonard was only ten years old when he left Albania with his family in 1994 and arrived on the shores south of Bari, during the years of the mass exodus from the Balkan country. His parents had decided to emigrate to Italy to offer Leonard and his sister a brighter future. They immediately noticed stark differences in small things, for example there was never a power outage. They moved to a small town in Molise, Portocannone, mostly inhabited by the descendants of Albanian 16th century migrants. "They were still speaking the old Albanian dialect, so immigrants were not seen as strangers," Leonard Berberi recounts to Scarp de' tenis magazine. "It was a small village with few inhabitants, and immigrants were not perceived as a threat. We relocated in the year 2000: my parents had chosen Italy to give us children the opportunity to study, and the Molise region offered hardly any prospects. We thus moved to Milan, so that my sister and I could finish high school and attend university. Today, Leonard is a journalist at Corriere della Sera.

Italy, a country of immigration. Thirty years ago, 20,000 Albanians boarded the Vlora vessel, landing on Italian shores in search of their very own America. The news was received with shock by national public opinion: people suddenly realised that Italy had become a country of immigration. In its July issue (cover title: E questi erano gli invasori, http://www.blogdetenis.it/), the magazine recounts the stories of those who, like Leonard, became an integral part of our country after crossing the Strait of Otranto. “I was a contributor for the immigration section of the paper, but however objective I tried to be when addressing certain sensitive issues, such as the question of citizenship, I soon realised that, as an immigrant, my reporting could be seen as biased, or, on the contrary, I was expected to adopt a rather partisan stance and would be criticised for being too detached.” Moreover, the fact of hovering between two worlds and two cultures provided him with a vantage point: “I consistently anticipated what was happening in Albania before others, including social transformations.”

From fear to integration. A few years ago he explored in depth the phenomenon of return immigration, when first generation immigrants, or their children, returned to their homeland to start anew. The presence of Albanians in Italy today is no longer a novelty. "The Albanian presence has been normalised. While in the beginning television played a major role in shaping the fear of Albanians, it has since made them a part of Italian social life. All through the 1990s, the typical Albanian was portrayed as a violent burglar. Over the years this depiction changed into that of a dancer or an entertainer. “Admittedly - Berberi remarked- there was and still is a problem with Albanian criminality, but it is no longer perceived as an impending and imminent problem. Nowadays, Albanian criminals operate in the underworld of drug dealing and money laundering. In other words, just as the honest Albanian has adapted to his new country and learned how to live here, so has the Albanian criminal".

"The beginning was hard...". Scarp magazine - promoted by Caritas Italy and Caritas Ambrosiana - also features the story of Anxhela Zeneli. She arrived in Italy with her family on a fishing boat in 1997 and is now an Italian citizen. In the first months of 2020 she returned to Albania for a cooperation project. As a Caritas Italy worker, she has been “lent” to Caritas Albania. This joint collaboration epitomizes her background and culture, a mixture of the Italian and Albanian heritage. Anxhela Zeneli – “that's how it's written, but we pronounce it Angela, like in Italian”, she explained - was born in Vlora, Albania, 30 years ago. She emigrated to Italy with her family in 1997. Her father had actually been travelling to and from Italy for a few years. As a former cook for weddings and special events in his country of origin, in 1992, like thousands of others, he came to Italy in search of a job to provide his family with a more dignified life. “It was a hard start, he lived in an illegal dwelling, without papers. He earned people’s trust and the money he sent us by doing manual work such as painting gates, fixing bicycles and harvesting vegetables in farm fields. Finally, in 1994, thanks to an amnesty, he managed to get his papers in order and the person he worked for hired him as a legally registered gardener.”

Accommodated inside a church. However, things rapidly changed for the worse. According to the street magazine's dossier, in 1997, the default of financial institutions in Vlore, where most of the population had their savings, marked the start of the massive revolts. "We were again left with nothing. But this time my parents decided that we would stay together. My mother, together with the rest of the family in Albania, decided to leave. At that time, sea crossings did not take place on dinghies, but on fishing boats. There was always a relative or an acquaintance who - in return for a generous fee per passenger - would fill their boat and navigate the Otranto Channel. Anxhela, who was a child at the time, remembers the rough sea, people feeling sick and cold. She has vivid memories of the Coast Guard ship that came to their rescue, which was immense to her child eyes. The first days in Puglia, she said, women and children were separated from the men, thus her grandfather and uncles were placed in different facilities. She recalls that they were housed in a church, where beds and clothes had been prepared for them and everyone did their best to help. She remembers that the refugees were spread throughout different shelters and that they ended up in Rimini "where my father came to pick us up together with his employer. We all returned to his rented house, in the province of Pavia, and that is where my new life began.”
Gianni Borsa