It is a known fact that Italians have not come to terms with their colonial past, and that xenophobic attitudes can be traced along the full political spectrum of Italian history and contemporary politics. In this essay, the author stresses the fact that Italians also turned colonialist when European colonialism was in decline, and racist when the rest of Europe put its racial tendencies under scrutiny. He further argues that the same attitudes of denial, delay, and blindness to the racial element in Italian society and politics can also be traced in the evolution of the social sciences from the end of the war to the early 1990s, when a sudden rise in immigration from the Mediterranean basin imposed the “racial other” to the center of both scholarly and political debates. As a consequence of this culpable delay, the author concludes that the principal attitudes towards Mediterranean migrants in Italian discourse, politics, and society still oscillate between criminalization on the right and a bland form of (multi)culturalism on the left, both oblivious to the profound oppression and “invisibility” of the “other” in Italian society.

Written in the style of a seventeenth-century Jesuit sermon, “Watery Graves” (“Fluidi Feretri” in the original Italian) takes its title from a sonnet by Giacomo Lubrone, a distinguished Jesuit orator and poet of the period. The piece was inspired by the death of a group of young Senegalese who left Dakar or a nearby port for the Spanish Canary Islands on Christmas Eve in 2005. After drifting thousands of miles off course, the boat eventually ran aground off the Caribbean Island of Barbados. “Watery Graves” is an invective against the blindness of the wealthy and “developed” Western world that allows thousands to die in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the African deserts while claiming to safeguard the “European Fortress” against immigrants. As is typical of Baroque sermons, the text is also a pastiche, drawing on the Western literary tradition of maritime meditations from Coleridge to T.S. Eliot and Paul Valèry. The sermon was performed on stage at the Naples Theatre Festival in June 2008 with Massimo Popolizio in the role of narrator.