Migrants hosted at a facility in the north-western Italian port city of Genoa have been forced to live in dire conditions, with only one meal a day while staying in rooms which reportedly are infested with insects and parasites. A local politician said he could not believe the run-down state of the facility.
Local councillor Ferruccio Sansa visited the hosting facility of Via del Campasso in Genoa's Sampierdarena district earlier in the week, and reported back that migrants staying there were "forced to live amid insects and parasites, in the cold, taking turns to eat only one meal a day, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, or on beds without mattresses."
The leader of the Lista Sansa party said that some of the migrants had "no shoes and clothes" to leave the centre. He added that the 50 migrants staying at the facility all were young men between the ages of 20 and 30, highlighting that they were the same age as "our own children."
Sansa shared that he saw a boy who "was there, lying on the floor" and whose body temperature "was feverish -- perhaps due to the bites" of parasites.
"You have to come here, in Via del Campasso in Sampierdarena, to understand what kind of hosting we reserve for migrants coming to this country," Sansa noted.
Endemic mismanagement
The migrant facility in Via del Campasso in Genoa is a rented building which is managed by Genoa's social cooperative Lanza del Vasto, which is becoming infamous for mismanagement.
On Tuesday, over 400 workers employed by Lanza del Vasto staged a protest in front of the regional council of Liguria, saying that the cooperative had not paid their salaries and that it did not respect their rights.
The workers have now started a strike, making the situation for the migrants living at their facilities, however, even more precarious.
No funding, no solutions
Meanwhile an employee working for Lanza del Vasto and managing the Via del Campasso facility told the ANSA news agency that the dire situation was due to poor management and funding, as well as lack of overall maintenance, saying that the organization was being run less like a cooperative and more like a private business.
"Liguria's health agency, which opened a centre, admitted that it did not have heating in the bathrooms three years after" it was inaugurated, the worker said. He stressed that in the past year, things had gone from bad to worse.
He added that generally speaking, "hosting centres for migrants in Genoa have very serious problems," stressing that there was a "lack of funding," which often came as too little, too late.
He highlighted that some of the younger migrants had occasionally rebelled against the conditions, with some breaking doors, which never got repaired.
"But when we don't even have a dish to give them something to eat on, we are the ones to blame, not them," the worker told ANSA.