It was an August afternoon, almost twilight, in the mid-nineties, and I was sitting on a veranda overlooking the Adriatic Sea, on the Strait of Otranto. The house was situated on a cliff of black rocks cascading into the sea, 40 meters down. I was visiting of a friend of mine, an Austrian artist who had settled in Salento several years earlier with her daughter. On the other shore of the Adriatic, just 71 kilometers across the water, was Albania, whose snow-covered mountains were often visible on a clear morning when the north wind swept away the clouds and the mist. A motor dinghy appeared on the horizon. It was sailing towards a small inlet hidden by the high cliff, a few hundred meters from our vantage point.
“Illegal migrants?” I asked my friend.
“Almost certainly,” she answered. “I am sure there’s a van waiting for them up there on the road.”
The narrow sound between Albania and Apulia has always made contact and trade easier between the opposite shores. In the XV century, the Albanian national hero in the fight against the Turks, George Castriota “Scanderbeg” would often land on the coast of lower Salento, since he also fought for the King of Naples, Ferdinand of Aragon, against his Angevin rivals. Many of his descendants still live here, some of them under the same family name of Castriota, others under the hero’s Turkish name Scanderbeg (“Iskander bey,” a name he acquired because in his youth he had also served in the Sultan’s army), sometimes with orthographic variations. Basilian monks in the Middle Ages imported from Albania a particular variety of oak, the “valonia,” still growing around the Salentino town of Tricase. The locals used its pulverized acorns for the tanning of leather, a once thriving activity in this part of Italy. A monumental 900-year-old valonia can be seen on the road to Tricase Porto.
Albanian refugees arriving at Brindisi.
In the twentieth century, after WWII, when Enver Hoxha’s Communists took power, all contact between and Albania and Italy ended. It was after the fall of the Communist regime that contact was, somewhat hesitantly, resumed. After the severe economic crisis that hit the country soon after, Albanians started to flee, crossing the Strait of Otranto with every possible craft, small sailboats or motorboats, fishing vessels, rubber dinghies, sometimes meeting a tragic fate. In March 1997, a group of maybe 142 people sailed on a stolen patrol boat from Valona, heading for the Italian coast, but they collided with an Italian corvette patrolling the area and sank. Dozens of people drowned. Six years earlier, in August 1991, 20,000 people had arrived in the port of Brindisi on the cargo “Vlora,” the largest group of migrants to ever disembark on Italian soil in a single landing. Smaller groups kept arriving almost daily for years on the Salentino coast, both on the Adriatic and the Ionian side. They were ferried by Albanian criminal gangs, who also smuggled heroin, and Kalashnikovs for the local Mafia, stolen from the Albanian army depots. The thugs also lured girls in the Albanian villages with the promise of jobs in Italy but, upon landing, they sold them to pimps who put them on roadsides as sex slaves.
A few days after witnessing the arrival of the dinghy from my friend’s veranda, I went for a walk in an area of low hillocks and deep ravines on the Ionian side of Salento. The ravines joined in a single, wide natural canal running directly to a beach and the sea, a couple of miles ahead. Once it had been a small river, but now it was almost dry, except for a narrow stream still running at the bottom, fed by a few scanty springs. In the Middle Ages, Basilian monks inhabited the caves at the base of the cliffside. In one of them, evidently used as a chapel, remains of frescoes are still visible. The canal is a triumph of lush vegetation – olives planted centuries ago, huge walnuts, fig trees, and Mediterranean scrub. On such walks, I normally go down to the bottom of the ravine and follow the course of the stream, taking snapshots of plants, wildflowers, and birds.
That day, the first thing that caught my eye and almost startled me, was a couple of heaps of clothes at the foot of a narrow path leading up – jeans, sweaters, socks, stockings, and underclothes were piled under an olive tree. And children’s garments, too. Shoes of all kinds were scattered nearby. At least two men and two women, and maybe three or four children seemed to have dumped their clothes there. But why? And where were they now? I moved on and more piles of clothes appeared, a long trail coming up apparently from the beach. Big nylon duffle bags lay abandoned too, most of them empty, but some still contained a few items. A bit farther, I saw a man, standing in front of one of the bags. He was examining its content and taking pictures. He was Alfred, an English friend of mine on holiday with his family in Salento, visiting his wife’s parents who lived in a “masseria,” a farmstead, on top if the highest of the surrounding hillocks.
The migrants’ clothes, which they abandoned in the woods of Salento.
We both knew by now that those items of clothing, which looked like flotsam of a shipwreck, had been discarded by migrants, certainly Albanians. They had probably landed on the beach, maybe jumping into the water, holding their children and their baggage over their heads so that they at least would not get soaked. They had walked inland following the canal, right up to the point where a path up led to the narrow country road running along the edge of the ravine, where someone was probably waiting for them. In the canal, they had worn dry clothes, dumped the wet ones and the empty bags. Probably in a hurry, in the rush to climb up to the road, some had abandoned their bags, which were still full. Alfred was examining one of these. He had extracted a pair of red high-heeled shoes and had placed them on a rock jutting from the ravine side. A few inches up, he had laid out a pair of small brown shoes, a child’s shoes, no doubt, and, a bit higher, a pair of men’s black shoes. It was like looking at the feet of people climbing the rocks to safety. Alfred took a picture of the composition. The bag also contained girl’s clothes and a diary, full of annotations in Albanian and with a few pictures between the pages, showing a teenage girl, alone or with (presumably) her family. Their faces were smiling.
Neither Alfred nor I could understand Albanian, but the word Anglia appeared more than once in the last annotations. Was the girl, let’s call her Lujeta (“the flower of life”), and her family bound for England? Maybe relatives were waiting for them there, but would they manage to cross Europe and the Channel, illegal aliens as they were, easy for the police to pick up?
Alfred decided to keep the diary with its photographs and its memories of happier times, so they would not be bleached out by the forecasted rain. He and his family went back to Britain a few days later.
Alfred has a daughter, Sonia, who at the time taught English to the children of a community of immigrants in East London. Her class included children and teenagers from the Middle East and Eastern European countries, including Albania. Out of curiosity, she asked whether anyone knew an Albanian girl named Mehmeti Lujeta. From the back of the room, an Albanian girl raised her hand: “But she lives nearby!” She added, “I can give you her address.” Sonia was gobsmacked, but could that really be …
The next day, Alfred and Sonia were skeptical when they knocked at an old but freshly painted door in a narrow alley in Shoreditch. A woman in her forties opened the door and, behind her, a young girl appeared. My two friends were aghast. She was the girl in the pictures.
“Are you Mehmeti Lujeta?,” they asked.
“Po, jam unë. Yes, me.”
“We found this, near a beach, in Italy. We think it’s yours,” said Alfred handing her the diary.
Lujeta could not believe her eyes as she thumbed through the pages of the booklet. She stopped to show the pictures to the woman. “Shiko, Mami!” (Look, Mum.)
Then, in a stumbling English, she asked, “And haven’t you also found a pair of red shoes?”
Alfred produced the snapshot of the three pairs of shoes he had lined up on the rocks at the bottom of the ravine. Lujeta looked at it and nodded, smiling.
This true story (the names of the people involved have been changed) dates back to times when hospitality and solidarity were still part of the gene pool of Italians, especially in the south, where people knew all too well the sufferings and the scars that emigration leaves in the heart of those who depart and those who are left behind. Over the years, alas, the wind has changed, with demagogues stirring up trouble and saddling migrants with the responsibility of all evils afflicting Italy, so that people might forget the rampant corruption of a rapacious political class and the monumental tax evasion, both stealing huge resources from the welfare. And, sad to relate, in Italy, and not only in Italy for that matter, too many people swallowed the bait. It may take some time before they spit it out.
