One cold, late evening in the winter of 1999, I was waiting for a train at Termini station in Rome when I noticed an old lady struggling with her suitcases and offered to help. “Signorina,” her voice trembled ever so slightly. “Fortunately there are still youngsters like you. I was very worried. This station is full of Albanian muggers. It’s an invasion.”
Back then I had no courage to tell her I was Albanian. One of the lucky ones – a student on a scholarship, unlike my fellow citizens who worked as cleaners, builders, carers and sex workers. We made headlines in Italy in those days. Sometimes as a nation of smugglers, pimps and burglars; sometimes as failed individuals, socialised under a different system, who struggled to integrate; and sometimes as corrupt, lazy people unable to implement in their own country the formula for success they had seen beamed over the Adriatic Sea on Silvio Berlusconi’s television channels.
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