Paola, Italy
(15:23, 19th June)
A 9 hour intercity train trip from Palermo to Naples is delayed. The train had skirted the coastline for most of the journey, making the crossing between Sicily and mainland Italy by driving directly onto a ferry. Once across and heading north the track improves and the train speeds up, until it reaches Paola, and has now been sitting stationary for 3 hours with little information given. Police investigating an incident involving a person on the tracks between x & y station. But the air-conditioning is kept on, people are free to sit inside or smoke on the platform, even exit the station. The toilet situation is little sketchy, as they empty directly onto tracks, and in the warm early evening the smell of piss and worse starts to rise. But updated estimated departure times are given, water bottles are handed out, then packets of biscuits, juice boxes and those salted Italian cracker things that go well with beer. No one is asked for documents and apologies are given in both Italian and English. Passengers huff and scroll through their phones but the inconvenience is minor with some perspective.
9 days earlier a rescue ship containing 629 migrants was turned away from Italian ports, left stranded at sea by the decision of the Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini, until 2 days later Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gave instruction for Spain to offer a safe port to the people on board the vessel. This despite the protest of a number of Southern Italian mayors who defy his anti-immigration stance and offer to assist without funding or approval.
Palermo’s Mayor Leoluca Orlando is one of these voices “We have always welcomed rescue boats and vessels who saved lives at sea. We will not stop now”. Orlando’s influence and involvement in Palermo hosting Manifesta 2018 is felt, his words open the programme and his response to the keynote address calls for peace, solidarity, respect for diversity, gender equality and the environment as well as mobility as a human right. Welcoming migrants who arrive as citizens of Palermo, if only as a symbolic action, is shocking but heartening to hear a politician say in 2018.
