It was the summer of magical nights. The summer of the football World Cup. And the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein (who then led wars to liberate Iraq). It was the summer of the very first cell phones. But it was also the summer of Pantanella, in Rome. The new world, that of immigration, forcefully "landed" in the news. And a priest understood that we couldn't stand by and watch: Don Luigi Di Liegro.
The director of L'Espresso, Marco Damilano, tells it in an article in the issue of the weekly magazine currently on newsstands.
La Pantanella was an old abandoned pasta factory, between Via Casilina and Via Prenestina and a few hundred meters from the Basilica of San Giovanni. A splendid example of industrial archaeology, where hundreds of immigrants moved, evicted from the historic center just before the football World Cup, mostly coming from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India. At the end of that experience, 3,532 people had passed through there, mostly young, educated and with a valid residence permit. They had set up an Italian school, a newspaper, a barber shop and a mosque, as well as developing a code of conduct and organizing a management committee and three working commissions. But it was the inhuman conditions in which these marginalized people found themselves living, without toilets, without water, in dilapidated spaces and surrounded by waste, that attracted the country's attention.
In this fresco remembered by Marco Damilano, the figures of Don Luigi Di Liegro and Dino Frisullo. Don Luigi was at Pantanella every day, among the dispossessed; the journalist describes him as a "meek, peacemaker" who had "never been satisfied" with his "hunger and thirst for justice". On the matter of the former pasta factory, Di Liegro worked incessantly to urge the municipal administration to assume responsibility, for the creation of a plan of interventions and reception centers, which would relieve the marginalized from that inhuman situation. He worked to create a work register, realizing that those people could redeem themselves with work, "with the urgency of someone who knows that there is no time to waste, that something must be done immediately".
Don Luigi, Damilano still remembers, had a profound and formidable knowledge of the Capital, of every place he had in mind "the suffering, the claims, the hopes". As Di Liegro stated, “The City is dramatically experiencing a social dialectic that revolves around the problem of acceptance or rejection of the many bearers of diversity with whom we find ourselves having to live – it is mentioned again in the article – Immigrants, nomads , disabled people, drug addicts, AIDS sufferers, lonely elderly people, teenagers outside their families: all those who cannot participate in economic growth and in the mechanisms that determine it".
Meanwhile, tensions were growing, both in the community that lived in the former pasta factory and outside. The unpreparedness of politics, those who rode the fear of citizens, the racism that was no longer creeping, the disturbing labels of the media: "Lager, Third World City, Ethnic Bomb, Monument of Degradation, Hideout of Terrorists". Much more encouraging is the name given to it by the occupants: "Shish Mahal", in Hurdu for "meeting place" or "crystal house".
The affair ended in January '91 with an eviction, the immigrants were distributed to locations outside Rome. "I saw people in shock. They were taken as if it were a deportation - stated Don Luigi Di Liegro - This story ended in the worst possible way".
Now the Pantanella is home to prestigious offices and apartments. Nearby, there is Pigneto, a small popular village, now trendy among young people. In short, a lot has changed in the city's social fabric. Not the unresolved question of acceptance and marginalization, in short of humanity.
