Italy: An Abandoned Italian Village Gets New Life (2024)

Rossella Aquilanti and Maka Tounkara, two people who could hardly be more different, are bucking the trend. They moved here voluntarily, and they live and work together. They manage a piece of land with a vegetable garden, goats, rabbits and chickens, using what they produce for a small restaurant in their home. They call it Cucina Contadina, "rustic kitchen.”

Aquilanti is standing in that kitchen wearing an apron and the clothes she had put on for the farm work that morning. With a big wooden spoon, she stirring a pot of noodles on the stove in front of her. Tounkara has just showered and is wearing a clean shirt along with silver rings and gold bracelets from home. He brings two plates of starters from the kitchen to the terrace, heaped with ricotta, cheese, olives, salami and crostini with prosciutto. Aquilanti had assembled the dishes. Her diet is primarily made up of pork meat and red wine, as is that of her guests. Tounkara, though, is Muslim and prefers mutton and mango juice.

The tour guide on the terrace tells his guests the story of their host and hostess. He jokingly refers to Aquilanti as the mayor of Pentedattilo. Tounkara, he says, is her friend who helps her with the land and with their visitors. They also offer lodgings here. The tour guide says that their relationship could become a kind of example. It’s a model that shows the positive aspects that migration can have for such a region.

Touran arrived in Italy in 2018, the year that a coalition pairing the right-wing populist party Lega Nord (now called Lega) with the populist Five Star Movement came into power. One month before the election, a right-wing extremist in the central Italian city of Macerata had shot at Black people. After the election, Lega Nord leader Matteo Salvini was named interior minister, transforming xenophobic propaganda into the country’s official message.

The political debate surrounding migration has grown even more uncompromising in recent years, and the country is led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who leads the post-fascist party Fratelli d’Italia. She has proposed setting up refugee camps in Albania so that migrants do not set foot in Italy while their asylum cases are being ruled upon.

In 2023, 157,000 people crossed the sea to Italy. The tour guide out on the terrace is convinced that an aging society like Italy badly needs these people. And so, too, is Mimmo Lucano, the former mayor of the nearby village of Riace. Because of his pro-migration policies, he even found himself in court on one occasion on charges of abusing his office, though he was acquitted. Lucano welcomed migrants and gave some of them jobs in his town’s administration, legally. Otherwise, around 20 percent of migrants in Calabria work under the table, frequently in agriculture at the tomato and orange farms in the region. In Riace, by contrast, migrants became long-term residents and started families there - establishing a possible future for the town.

By the time the bells chime eight in the morning, Aquilanti has usually been in the kitchen for over an hour cleaning up from the night before. She is usually too tired to do so in the evenings. She then drives into the countryside in her 20-year-old Jeep to pull weeds in the vegetable garden. She will then usually make cheese or ricotta out of fresh milk, or she’ll drive into town if she needs animal feed or has to go to the post office.

Aquilanti has provided Tounkara with a contract, allowing him to stay in the country, and she pays him a small wage in addition to room and board. Tounkara provides Aquilanti with strength, stamina and his ability to work with the animals in the countryside.

The two of them met six years ago in Africo, a small coastal town 50 kilometers north of Pentedattilo. The long series of coincidences that ultimately brought their lives together can essentially be summed up as follows.

Rosa Aquilanti was born in Italy on July 14, 1959, about one-and-a-half hours north of the capital Rome by car. Most people in Calabria call her Rossella.

Makandiana Tounkara was born in Mali on December 31, 1988, around three-and-a-half hours west of the capital Bamako by car. In Calabria, most people call him Maka, though Aquilanti frequently calls him Maki.

Aquilanti wanted to see the world, Tounkara did not. Aquilanti worked in northern Italy as a mail carrier after finishing school. Tounkara never went to school, instead working on his uncle’s farm, milking cows and camels even as a child. As soon as she had saved a bit of money, Aquilanti quit working and traveled through Italy, driven by curiosity and love. One time, the cows he was responsible for grazed on fields where they were not permitted. Tounkara would have had to pay – but he had no money. So he left his home village – out of necessity, he says.

Aquilanti says that when she was on the Sicilian island of Lipari, a friend told her about the abandoned village in Calabria. She traveled to Pentedattilo, she says, fell in love with the place and ultimately settled there. After a few years, she fell in love with a man and moved with him to Africo.

Tounkara, meanwhile, worked in the Malian capital of Bamako, then in Algeria and then in Libya, where he ended up in prison as a migrant. He says he was then bought free by a Libyan man and worked for him to pay off his debt. When he then wanted to return to Mali, he paid a migrant smuggler to take him there, since the war in northern Mali made it impossible to cross the border legally. But, he says, he was put into the wrong group of migrants. He made it to Sicily across the Mediterranean Sea and, a short time later, ended up in the refugee hostel in Africo.

When Aquilantis’ partner died suddenly of a heart attack, she was 60 years old and needed help with her farm. She asked around at the refugee hostel in the town, where she met Tounkara. He needed work, papers and, when the refugee hostel closed down, a place to live.

Aquilantis then decided to return to Pentedattilo, and Tounkara agreed to join her. He saw the place on Google Maps and thought he was moving to a different town, not to an abandoned village.

One afternoon, Tounkara and Aquilanti are sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen. It’s raining outside. He is wearing a robe from Mali, white from head to foot. She is wearing her work clothes, all black. Her face is covered in wrinkles, his is completely smooth.

When Aquilanti saw Pentedattilo for the first time, she says, she was immediately impressed by the size of the rocky hills and the beauty of the view. The name Pentedattilo comes from Ancient Greek and means "five fingers.” The village is on a range of mountains from which five rock spires jut into the sky. When Tounkara saw Pentedattilo for the first time, he says he was shocked. After three months, he wanted to leave. But he stayed. Why?

The answer, to be sure, has a lot to do with power structures and with the difficulties facing a man who has only just learned to read and write and who has a precarious legal status when it comes to authoring his own future. But that’s not the whole story.

It's later in the evening and they have no guests for dinner. Aquilanti is sitting in the kitchen and eating a pork cutlet while Tounkara is washing carrots at the sink for his own dinner. Mutton is boiling in a pot. They never share a meal together.

She asks him: "Maki, when I die, will you leave Pentedattilo?” "I’m here because I enjoy helping you, Rossella. That’s the only reason,” Tounkara replies. "There are only rocks and holes here, holes and rocks.” When he leaves the kitchen, she says: He doesn’t know it, but when she dies, she will be leaving the house to him.