Unofficial Italy

Aperture Priorities Contact Sheet #21

Jul 23, 2024

Actually existing Italian politics. Porta Palazzo, Torino.

By Joel Schalit

Everyone was Black. But they were speaking Italian, peppered with French and Arabic.

As a Spanish speaker who grew up hearing the latter two languages at home, it wasn’t hard to understand what people were saying.

The question is what they were doing here.

This was my first time in Italy in nearly fifteen years. The sailboat I was travelling on had tied up in Genova, and I was sent into town to pick up some supplies.

As disorienting as this scene was, it was a relief. It reminded me of where I went to high school in Brooklyn, an immigrant-heavy Caribbean neighbourhood full of Creole-speaking Haitians.

If I needed help, I’d ask for it in French.

Still, I couldn’t get over how different things were. My last time in Italy was in 1979. My father had moved us to Milano, and we were looking at international schools for me to enrol in.

Fresh off the boat from London, I couldn’t get over how white everyone was.

Where I’d gone to school, half the student body was Muslim, hailing from Arab, Iranian, and South Asian families.

As far as I was concerned, we’d just moved to Norway.

I often look back at this moment in Columbus’s hometown as though it were an introduction to today’s European Union.

An EU, specifically, whose diversity matched my experiences growing up in an Israeli immigrant family in big cities long before we used such terms as ‘globalisation’.

This was just how things are, in my experience.

That’s why I continue to prefer to live in cities like Torino, which are a cultural composite of New York and London in the 1980s, albeit on a much smaller scale.

That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with this diversity.

A punching bag of Italy’s far-right, it’s impossible not to see immigrants like me and project feelings of tenuousness and vulnerability onto them.

This edition of Aperture Priorities documents that feeling of insecurity in its choice of images and editorialised captions.