Michael Day
September 12, 2013
Italy’s racial tensions are now manifesting themselves in the country’s schools, with evidence that Italian parents are removing their children from classrooms that they consider contain too many immigrants.
In perhaps the most clear cut case so far, in the village of Corti, near the northern city of Bergamo, all seven Italian children have been withdrawn from a first-year elementary school class where they were outnumbered by non-Italian pupils. The remaining 14 children are mainly Africans (mostly Moroccans) with some Albanians and Romanians.
Marinella Ducoli Bertoni, 57, the school’s head teacher, said: “Until July, the parents assured me that they were going to send their children to the school. Then one by one the families changed their minds. I’ve returned to school and I found that they’re all gone.”
It started with “little things, such as the fear of not being able to celebrate Christmas. It was a feeling of uncertainty that spread slowly and changed the minds even of those who’d had their other children with us for five years,” she told La Repubblica newspaper.
“I don’t think you can talk of racism,” she said. “In all these years there’s never been a problem with the holidays of different religions. The Arab families never complained if we spoke about Christmas; they understood that at school it’s a cultural thing, not a religious one.”