WPost: Foreigners Making Italy a Permanent Destination

In Rome, a Cave Is Now a Home
Foreigners Making Italy a Permanent Destination

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 5, 2004; Page A01

Pictu
http://tinyurl.com/33bff
Caption:
Todor Velikov stands outside his home, a cave in the Parioli district
of Rome. He has lived in the cave for 18 months, after wandering from
place to place.


ROME -- The cave home of Todor Velikov is a room with no view, but it
does have the advantage of zero rent and historical pedigree.

Velikov is a Bulgarian migrant laborer who, along with thousands of
other clandestine arrivals to Rome, has taken up residence among the
nooks and crannies of an ancient city filled with out-of-the-way
hideouts. The newcomers inhabit abandoned houses, construction sites,
parks, the undersides of bridges, Roman ruins and, in Velikov's case,
a hole on a hillside -- actually, a 2nd-century grotto that once
sheltered images of Roman gods.

Once a stopover on the way to wealthier northern nations, Italy is
becoming a permanent destination. It formerly resisted accepting
foreigners but is now emerging as a welcoming host. Under laws issued
by the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the number of
residency permits granted last year exploded to 630,000, almost triple
that of the year before, according to Interior Ministry statistics.

The government decided that regularizing the status of immigrants
helped fulfill the needs of businesses that employed them, mainly in
menial tasks. The program was supposed to be accompanied by a
crackdown on illegal residents, but few have been deported.

Besides serving as an example of the destitution of many migrants,
Velikov's cave house, set among about 20 other such hidden grottoes
north of central Rome, highlights the latest trend in arrivals: a boom
in East Europeans coming from beyond the newly expanded European
Union.

Newcomers from such countries as Romania, Ukraine, Moldova and
Bulgaria are beginning to statistically muscle out migrants from as
far afield as Morocco, the Philippines, Tunisia and China, according
to data gathered by the Catholic relief agency Caritas.

"Italy is really experiencing an Eastern European phenomenon," said
Lequyin Ngodhin, a Caritas official in Rome. "The situation in the
East is gravely deteriorating. Countries like Romania, Bulgaria and
Ukraine are far from joining the European Union. Their people aren't
waiting. They're coming here to join first."

The length of Italy's coastline and relatively light internal controls
make pinning down the immigrant population guesswork. However, Italy
also has been issuing legalization papers in increasing numbers, and
observers note that the numbers of East European applicants for
residence are rising faster than those of any other group.

Requests from Romanians and Bulgarians doubled over the past year,
according to the Interior Ministry, which handles immigrant affairs.
Those from citizens of Ukraine multiplied by eight; the number of
applicants from Moldova multiplied by five.

Romanians now represent the largest single number of legal aliens in
Italy. They're here as extracommunitari, meaning residents from
outside the E.U., and they make up 10 percent of Italy's 2.5 million
legal immigrants.

The East European accent is notable in the cave suburb where Velikov
and a fellow Bulgarian, Pyotor Desislav, live, just below the stylish
Parioli neighborhood. Except for the presence of a few native homeless
people, most of about 20 grottoes are inhabited by citizens of former
Communist bloc countries. "We have a little Warsaw Pact here," said
Desislav, referring to the defunct Soviet military alliance. "We all
get along. We're just trying to save money."

Velikov, an elevator repairman who has lived in Italy for six years,
said he chose the cave over rental housing because of its convenience.
"There are lots of stores nearby where I do my shopping," he said.

He said he sometimes considers going back to Bulgaria, but then
thinks, "Why should I leave? Look where I live. This is a good place."
He has lived in the cave for 18 months, after wandering from temporary
home to temporary home.

Desislav's cave was decorated with a Daffy Duck movie poster, a
billboard for a Roman bookstore, wall-to-wall carpeting and dried
flowers. There was a place to shower in one corner, a fireplace in
another. A natural skylight illuminated a small table scavenged from a
junkyard. Desislav is a construction worker who has lived in Rome off
and on for nine years. He suffered a heart attack recently and is
being treated at a Rome hospital. "I can't go back to Bulgaria now,"
he said. "I would die there. But I can only do light odd jobs now. I'm
too weak."

He received a visitor from Moldova, a Russian speaker who joined the
cave community recently. "My country is so poor," said the Moldovan,
Gregor Artemev, a mechanic. "The only way to make real money is to
come here. Rome is an expensive city. If I pay rent, I will make
nothing."

Migration is changing the face of once-homogenous Italian cities.
Africans, Arabs, Slavs, Albanians, Filipinos and Chinese jostle one
another on streets full of clothing vendors, fruit and vegetable
salespeople, souvenir hawkers, prostitutes and their pimps. Restaurant
kitchens once peopled only by Italians now employ Bangladeshi cooks
and Ecuadoran busboys.

Migrant ghettoes have sprung up all over. Some are made up exclusively
of single ethnic groups. African workers, for instance, dominate the
fruit orchards north of Naples. The Chinese populate large communities
near Florence, where they produce leather goods, and others in Rome,
where they have set up wholesale clothing outlets similar to those
once operated by Jewish peddlers.

Many of the communities are mixed, however. Near Rome's main Termini
train station, Africans, South Asians and East Europeans inhabit
rundown apartments if they can afford rent -- or abandoned tenements,
basements and outdoor camps that spring up by night in public parks if
they can't.

"It's warm here," said Daniel, a 22-year-old Romanian computer school
graduate who came to Rome in May looking for work. "You can imagine,
if you are from the Ukraine, sleeping out in Rome is almost a
pleasure."

Daniel and his friend Christian, both from Bucharest, the capital,
said they had had little luck finding jobs. Neither has a residency
permit. They bunk at the apartments of other Romanian immigrants, and
when those places are full, they camp at the edge of the Appian Way
archaeological park among the remains of an imperial aqueduct.

They sometimes turn to prostitution to make ends meet. "If we were at
home, we'd be embarrassed. But we're sending money back, and no one
asks questions," Daniel said as he, Christian and a Filipino
transvestite departed for a night at the Re di Roma bingo parlor.
Their sex-for-hire earnings of about $50 a night equals what they
figure they would earn in a month in Romania.

Caritas data indicate that Romanian immigrants are relatively
well-educated, but that Italy, which has lagged in the Internet-driven
high-tech boom, has few jobs to offer them. "They would be far better
off in the United States," said Franco Pitani, a Caritas program
coordinator. "But they can get here easier, even if times are harder
here."

The spread of migrants around the city has upset some Romans. The city
depends a great deal on tourism and pilgrimage, and the wave of male
and female prostitutes near the Termini Station and the campers under
Tiber River bridges and at the grottoes interferes with Rome's
postcard imagery.

Writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera, columnist Giuseppe
Pullara noted the contrast between the Parioli neighborhood and the
caves beneath it: "On the surface, a rich and happy population . . .
and below, meandering under earth, the blind unhappiness of a people
without hope, tied to hard labor at the service of those living
above."

City hall is trying to find a way to empty and seal the Parioli caves.
Officials say they hope to provide rent assistance to the inhabitants,
then seal the grottoes when the squatters move out.

Antonio Saccone, an adviser to Rome's mayor, Walter Veltroni, noted
that police recently cleared an improvised campground at a park in the
Colle Oppio district where hundreds of migrants spent the night.
"There's a sanitation problem; there are dangers from fires and
crime," he said. "The problem is these people don't want to move. It's
not that no housing exists. They would rather camp out or live in a
doorway than pay. It's a social and economic problem. We can't have
people living like this in 2004."

Velikov, the Bulgarian, disagrees. "If they send us away, others will
just come and take our place," he said. "Excuse me, but I worked hard
to make this place what it is. I civilized this place. When I first
came here, there were snakes and mice. It was the Stone Age."

Special correspondent Stacy Meichtry contributed to this report.


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