An interesting week as far as immigration is concerned in Italy as Silvio Berlusconi’s new rightwing cabinet, at its first meeting in Naples, endorsed a package of tough measures aimed at Gypsies and clandestine immigrants. In a move that appeared certain to cause controversy, the interior minister, Roberto Maroni, said local authorities would be empowered to check on the living conditions of citizens from other EU nations before granting them right of residence.
An article this morning in the Guardian newspaper in the UK by their correspondent in Italy, John Hooper can be found here In it he states that the rules now make it easier to expel foreigners.
In the same newspaper another article on immigration, again written in part by John Hooper when he was here in Barga last September, tells the story of how in the past decade 2 million Britons have moved abroad – a record level.
Five people who were born in Britain but have emigrated to the countries their parents came from, explain why they felt the need to leave. One of the many people John interviewed while he was in Barga was Vanda Moscardini from the Gelateria in Barga Vecchia.
Vanda Moscardini can recall the moment she began to float between two cultures. It was her first day at the Convent of Mercy school in Glasgow. She was four and a half years old, and the nuns had set her an aptitude test.
“I left the book with nothing done in it. The nuns thought I had something wrong with me.” In fact, she could not speak English.
“We all spoke Italian at home. My grandmother got through most of her life in Scotland speaking very little English,” she recalls. We are sitting at the table of her ice-cream parlour in the walled Tuscan hill town of Barga, from which her father and her mother’s parents both emigrated and where today she is known as la signora scozzese (the Scottish lady).
Moscardini’s grandparents all arrived in Britain after the first world war. “They were simple people from the mountains around Barga. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a cobbler. He was one of the first to make old-fashioned Italian ice-cream in Scotland, served in ‘pokey hats’. That’s what they called cones in those days. My grandfather on my father’s side was more a man of means. He had land in Italy and I don’t think he farmed it. He went into the fish and chip trade.”
After school, she did a secretarial course at Glasgow Technical College and then got a job with an engineering firm. In 1969, she married a man from Barga who had come to work in Glasgow and they started to build what they originally conceived as a holiday retreat back in his home town.
“In 1976, he decided to go home. And I emigrated,” she says. “I felt I was going into an adventure. Our children were still of nursery age, so it didn’t disrupt their education. If we’d moved a few years later, it would have been disastrous for them.”
Speaking to others – and there are several in Barga – who have gone back to their families’ roots, you notice a difference. Some refer to Scotland as “back home”. Others say “over there”. Moscardini repeatedly crosses and re-crosses this invisible, linguistic frontier.
“When I’m in Scotland I say ‘back home’ about Italy and when I’m here I feel at home in Barga”, she says. “Barga has welcomed me.
“Perhaps there was more bigotry back home. We lived in a Protestant part of Glasgow, near St George’s Cross. And it wasn’t always friendly. The Catholic holidays of obligation were particularly difficult, when we were playing outside and the Protestant children were going to school. I was embarrassed about my name. I’d turn Moscardini into Moss. Even in the companies where I worked I was always ‘the Italian girl’.”
Are there things she misses now?
“Something always ties you to the other country,” she says. “I still have my mother and sister there. But apart from my family, I don’t know what I miss. Perhaps dressing up on a Saturday night to go out for an evening meal. It’s more formal, and more fun, back home.
“Would I go back? Well, it’s not in my plans. But then I never thought I’d come to live in Italy. Life is funny. It takes funny routes. Never say never.”
Interview by John Hooper – Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi