Some sociological thoughts based on an unrepresentative sample.
We have first-gen friend who has gone on about immigrants to Italy. I am sure that is happening, as climate change and political unrest make staying put untenable. Migration is a fact of life, and political boundaries are arbitrary anyway. What white Americans in this country conveniently forget is that they were immigrants too, and many were "illegal".
What I saw in Italy was a very homogenous white country, even in Rome. Again, we were tourists and we were in mostly tourist areas. The Italians I saw during the bike portion of the tour, hosts, laborers, people on the street, were all white. I saw ONE dark-skinned person at the lunch stop on day six and I am pretty sure he was a laborer. And there were some darker-skinned people running street shops in Florence and in Rome and hawking cheap things at the tourist attractions. But all the people running brick-and-mortar shops, tour guides, transport workers, shoppers, people in restaurants, people out and about, as I remember it, were all white.
This certainly says something about stratification, and stratification is also closely correlated with race. We didn't see the slums. On our trip to Croatia, we stayed in a hotel in Split far away from the touristy waterfront and it was tough and gritty. It didn't encourage you to go out. But we were there to be in a good place to catch a flight the next day so it didn't really matter.
There were two dark-skinned men on the tour to Cinque Terre. I didn't have a chance to chat with them. There was a single dark-skinned man at breakfast in our hotel in Florence. I did get a chance to chat with him long enough to find out that he was not a cyclist. He was wearing a t-shirt for a charity run, so chances are he was at least middle class.
That was pretty much it. Everyone of our bike tour was white except me. All of our many tour guides were white. All our transport and hotel workers were white. All of the people on all of our flights were white. We had one dark-skinned flight attendant. I don't remember seeing people of color in the airports but my mental images are of white people.
This doesn't add up to much, but I had one experience at the Rome airport that left me with a bad taste of Italy.
We decided to get some food since we had time before our flight. We scouted the food court and looked for likely options. I found one that had a plate of grilled vegetables and a lot of the airline crew went there so we figured that was a good sign.
There seemed to be a starting place, so I stood there with 10 Euros in my hand. At least a half dozen airline crew members walked up behind me and the woman behind the counter ignored me and served them. After about a dozen of them got got what they wanted, it was pretty clear I was not going to get served.
I went to a second shop and stood under the "place order here" sign. I was the only one there. There was long line at the "pick up order here" sign. When it became clear that no one was going to come over to take my order, I gave up.
At neither place, was I ignoring posted directions. No one told me I was doing it wrong. Maybe they were too busy to point me in the right direction. Maybe they treat everybody badly. But I don't think it was a coincidence that I was the only person at either shop who was not white, or at the first place, who was not also speaking Italian.
This experience reminded me of the Jim Crow laws that lead to the civil rights lunch counter demonstrations, except I didn't get beaten up or spit on. Still, it is no less painful to be invisible, that you are just not there, or people don't want to do business with you.
This is just a very small sliver of my lived experience. I am not BIPOC in the United States where the long history of explicit and implicit discrimination is much more dramatic and touches lives in deeper and more profound ways. But it's not a micro-aggression either.
I come from privilege and I never forget that. But social class privilege does not eliminate the possibility that people will treat you badly because you look different. It is too bad that this is what I will remember of my last day in Italy.
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