This mid-August will be remembered for the tragedy of the Morandi bridge in Genoa and for the victims and wounded who made its incredible collapse. But in Italy there are other symbolic places that help us decipher difficult times like the ones we live. One of these is Portopalo di Capo Passero: it is the south of the north of the world, the extreme tip of a Sicily that has built its beauty on contradictions and encounters.
It is a small dot on the map, so small that many often do not even notice it. Yet it is precisely there that Italy ends (further south only the municipality of the islands of Lampedusa and Linosa) and it is always there that Europe meets that natural border beyond which "the other south" begins, the one - according to the sovereign mainstream - to be despised and rejected. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely because of its position that more and more people choose Portopalo di Capo Passero (Syracuse) as an exceptional tourist destination, a gem to visit on a trip to Sicily worthy of a Grand Tour of the seventeenth century. You can swim in the Caribbean waters of Playa Carratois or in the wild waters of the Vendicari Reserve, admire the Spanish fortress of Capo Passero Island with amazement, wake up early to buy fish, the good good, directly from the fisherman who arrives in the small port in the early hours of the morning, you can taste the tuna - in the shade of the splendid 700th century tuna fishery - together with the Pachino cherry tomatoes, another delicacy of a land which it is better not to approach if you are smelling of diet.
Portopalo di Capo Passero is a village of less than 4 thousand souls that it could represent the perfect synthesis of an island kissed by nature, a "prodigious center where so many rays of world history converge", defined it by Goethe in his Journey to Italy. The tiny tip of the island seems to be the essence of this prodigy.
Many say (exaggerating a bit) that on the most beautiful days, those with a totally clear sky and the sun overlooking Portopalo, from the Isola delle Correnti – where the Ionian Sea and the Mediterranean Sea meet – you can even see the African coasts. Those same coasts from which hundreds of migrants departed in December 1996 and were shipwrecked in the night between 24 and 26 December a 19 nautical miles off Portopalo di Capo Passero: 283 people died in what was the second largest naval tragedy in the Mediterranean since the end of the Second World War.
Even today, desperate poor continue to leave those same coasts who see salvation in that strip of land that encloses Europe. without knowing that upon their arrival they will find ministers and politicians ready to transform them into the symbol of all evil. And it doesn't matter if the number of landed migrants has dropped from over 100 in 2016 to 19 updated as of August 13, 2018 (source Ministry of the Interior), data are of little interest to the propaganda machine.
I arrived in Portopalo di Capo Passero on August 7, 3 days after the Coast Guard intercepted off its coast a sailboat carrying 61 migrants of Pakistani origin who were then transferred to Augusta. To make the crossing, they said they paid 5 euros each.
At this point, it is difficult not to return to the contradictions referred to earlier when speaking of a land where tourism and immigration merge together in an oxymoronic mix of welcome and rejection that starts from here and then spreads throughout Italy. To be a tourist in my land, I chose a small hotel overlooking the sea, without too many pretensions but with attention to every detail. At the reception to welcome us a kind, professional guy, but with that irony matelica that only true Sicilians can have. His attention is drawn to my date's birthplace: “Switzerland,” she reads aloud. Then he asks a seemingly harmless question: "But do you have citizenship?". He seems to like the negative answer a lot: “You see? Yes, that is a civilized country, far from Ius Soli and integration". From acceptance to intolerance the step was very short. Yet walking through the streets of Portopalo that much despised integration seems to have naturally succeeded. We need young people, we need workers to respond to the summer boom and who cares about the place of birth. An old man jokes with a black boy who will be at most 25 years old "Chi fai ca cu mia, Iu all'età to a st'ura ieva appressu e fimmini” (Why are you here with me, at your age at this time I was already courting some girl, ed.). She makes me smile: from intolerance we return to acceptance.
According to the data of theEconomic Observatory of Confartigianato Sicily, this year the Trinacria has officially experienced its tourist rebirth. Last year's recovery is outclassed by the numbers of 2018: tourist presences amount to 14,7 million, up by 7,3% in the last twelve months, a number that exceeds the 2016 figure by one million and is close to the all-time high reached in 2014. Arrivals boom: 4.857.542 (+449 thousand on 2016, equal to +10,2 ,7,9%). Among foreigners, French tourists excel (6,4% of total arrivals), followed by Germans (3,5%) and Americans (20%), even if among the 58,7 countries examined there is above all a strong increase in tourists from Russia (+XNUMX%). Given these as well as the previous ones, but this time they are taken into consideration - rightly - and declaimed with pride and satisfaction.
If Portopalo di Capo Passero can represent Sicily in its small way, Sicily can represent the whole of Italy. Looking at the country from its lowest and most remote point the contradictory feelings seem to be the same: acceptance and rejection. Apparently, today's dominant politics has decided to focus on the latter.
