A dawning of realism in Italy

PADUA is renowned for its ancient university and medieval frescoes by Giotto. Yesterday, however, it acquired a less attractive claim to fame: a steel wall, 84m long and 3m high, blocking off a run-down housing estate with a high immigrant population and a reputation for drugs, violence and prostitution.

The wall was erected overnight by the local council around a cluster of run-down apartment blocks housing 1,500 people that is known as the Padua Bronx. A police checkpoint has been set up to control access to and from the estate. The council said that the wall had cost €80,000 (£54,000).

Some reports said, however, that the operation — including the installation of CCTV — costs as much as €270,000. Italian newspapers said that “a new Berlin Wall has gone up — this time in the heart of Italy”.

Il Giornale compared the Padua wall to the fence dividing Israel from the West Bank. La Repubblica ran the headline: “Padua is divided in two.”

Police said that the flats — on what is officially the Serenissima (Most Serene) estate — had once been occupied by students, but over the past decade had been taken over by immigrants from Africa, including the Maghreb, Asia and Eastern Europe. “Many of them are illegal immigrants,” a police spokesman said. “There is a serious drugs problem .”

Police raided several flats at dawn yesterday, arresting ten clandestini (illegal immigrants) and seizing hundreds of grammes of cocaine. Last month police used teargas to quell street fighting between nearly 200 Nigerians and Moroccans, and confiscated weapons including machetes and meat cleavers.

The wall was condemned by Giancarlo Galan, the centre-right President of the Veneto Region, as a “policy of despair”. He said that it amounted to an admission of failure by Padua’s centre-left council

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2307208,00.html

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, August 11, 2006 at 10:42 AM in
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Comments:

Posted by Kenelm Digby on August 11, 2006, 11:35 AM | #

Italy has come very late to the mass immigration game, I believe the phenomenom over there is actually on-going now as I write,and is not much over 10 years old.
A particular kind of soppy leftism prevalent in Italy, (as in Spain), seems to be the reason.
Gosh, the Italians have a lot to learn from the northern Europeans and north Americans on this issue, put very simply a black is a black is a black.
The association with filth and crime which seems to define Italy’s black invaders, even though they have invaded a nation with a ‘clean sheet’ and no so-called ‘history of racism’, speaks volumes.

Posted by dchamil on August 11, 2006, 12:28 PM | #

A wall 84 meters long (about 252 feet) sounds awfully short to enclose a cluster of apartment blocks housing 1500 people, even though the referenced article cites this figure. Perhaps the reporter made a mistake. Maybe each of the four sides is 84 meters long.

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