I had read moving articles and essays about the plight of people like these-I had read several of those pieces out loud to my children I had watched terrible reports from the BBC, and the almost unbearable Italian documentary “ Fire at Sea.” And so what? What good are the right feelings if they are only right feelings? I was just a moral flaneur. Use the plastic bags you see on the private road.”
There have been no problems-yet.” Near that house, there was a makeshift sign, in Arabic and English: “Migrants, please do not throw your garbage into the nature. “You might see them in the hills,” the genial woman who gave us the key to our house said. We learned that they had made their way to Italy from various African countries and were now desperate to get into France, either to stay there or to push on farther, to Britain and Germany. They were tall, dark-skinned, conspicuous because they were wearing too many clothes for the warm Riviera weather. We saw the young men everywhere in that Italian hinterland-usually in groups of two or three, walking along the road, climbing the hills, sitting on a wall.
They were a good deal more interested in the African migrants, who gathered with persistent hopelessness on the Italian side of the border, just a few feet from the guard post. We didn’t have to stop, and the listless border guards barely glanced at our respectable little hired car, with its four white occupants.
Daily, we crossed the border into France and back again into Italy. Dry hills, the azure Mediterranean, scents of rosemary and lavender, a lemon tree in the garden. Illustration by Andrea Ventura reference from Mimmo Frassineti / REX / APĮarlier this summer, my family spent a week in an Italian village near Menton, just over the border that Italy shares with southern France. In “Go, Went, Gone,” a retired German academic becomes involved in the precarious lives of African asylum-seekers.
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