The Life Support rescue vessel, run by the Emergency NGO, reached the Tuscan port of Marina di Carrara with 55 migrants on board in the morning of April 19. They had been rescued off the Libyan coast four days earlier.
The passengers on board the Life Support were comprised of 49 adults, including three women, as well as three children and three unaccompanied teens.
Upon arrival, they were first given a series of medical tests; a nurse on the Life Support said that medical attention was important as some of the 55 migrants on board "had burns because they came into contact with fuel and salty seawater before being rescued."
He added that some passengers, especially women, also had some "old traumas" and "chronic urinary tract infections that clearly had started months ago," stressing however that no passenger was in any kind of "critical" condition.
Local Mayor Serena Arrighi came to the port to welcome the migrants along with Prefect Guido Aprea, who helped in coordinating the reception operations.
A banner placed at the port entrance by a group of locals meanwhile read: "Welcome! Nobody in Carrara is a foreigner."
Tuscany left to its own devices
After the medical checks, the migrants had to undergo identification procedures and were provided with food, clothes and blankets before being transferred to hosting centres across Tuscany.
This processing and hosting system had already adopted been back in January when the region first welcomed passengers from an NGO ship. Since then, there have been other procedures introduced by the central government as well to lift some of the burden off the back of municipalities hosting migrants.
However, Tuscany is one of four regions in Italy which refuses to hand over its migrant responsibilities to the central government since a state of emergency was declared last week following an exceptional rise in migrant numbers. This means that it cannot use central government resources to manage migrants and has to organize its own procedures when migrants like the passengers on the Life Support vessel arrive there.
'Cruel' practices
After the reception of the migrants, local Civil Protection Councillor Monia Monni denounced recent developments in the country's migrant reception system.
She said that in Italy, "we are trying to govern as an emergency a phenomenon which is not an emergency. Immigration is a structural phenomenon."
She went on to say that "it is cruel to prolong for days the journey of NGOs," referring to a new law regulating search and rescue operations by NGO-run ships as well as the practice of assigning ports far from the Italian search-and-rescue (SAR) area in the Mediterranean.