BORGO SAN LORENZO, Italy — The first hint that Ethnos is not your typical Tuscan restaurant is the smell coming from the kitchen; it’s stronger and spicier than the usual Italian aromas.
Nestled in the rolling Apennine hills, a little less than an hour’s drive north of downtown Florence, the locale has become a popular weekend destination for the city’s residents. They come not only for the food, but for a chance to mingle with the people making it.
The waitress is from Pakistan. The chef is a young Ethiopian woman named Sara Unatu Tagi. Fluent in Italian, she is known for her ingera, traditional East-African flatbread topped with vegetables or meat and spiced with saffron, ginger and curcuma. “Back home I loved cooking, it’s always been my calling,” she says. “So when I got here I just thought it was the best thing I could do.”
Chef Sara Unatu Tagi prepares one of her specialties at Ethnos | Silvia Marchetti
For refugees in Italy, the restaurant — and the surrounding estate, named Villaggio La Brocchi — is a bright point of successful integration in what can all too often be a bleak landscape of neglect or hostility.
Italy is struggling to accommodate an influx of refugees; some 120,000 asylum seekers are spread out across temporary camps, other accommodations, parks and train stations in the country’s major cities.
According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, roughly 100,000 refugees have landed in Italy so far in 2016 and some 200,000 new arrivals are expected to make landfall this year. For the most part, they are funneled into overcrowded refugee camps in Lombardy and Sicily. Human rights groups have denounced the conditions in many of the camps.
The center currently hosts 38 families from Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria and Kosovo.
Villaggio La Brocchi is part of the Italian Interior Ministry’s Protection System for Refugees and Asylum Seekers (SPRAR), which accommodated some 30,000 refugees in 2015. The state pays Onlus Progetto Accoglienza, the non-profit organization that runs the center, about €35 per day to host and integrate each migrant.
The central reddish colonial villa hosts the town’s largest restaurant, the library, a conference and exhibition hall, and a classroom for Italian language lessons. In a converted barn next door, migrant families live in separate apartments with common kitchens.
The center currently hosts 38 families from Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria and Kosovo. Some are waiting to be granted asylum, while others already have refugee status and have decided to make Tuscany their home. The usual stay in the center lasts about a year.
What makes Villaggio La Brocchi different from other centers is its effort to integrate not just the individual refugees but the entire project into the surrounding community. The estate, which originally belonged to the Catholic Church, dates back to the 1400s, and was once a flourishing rural hamlet. In modern times, it fell into oblivion until local authorities gave it a new life as an integration center.
La Tinaia hotel inside the migrants’ village | Silvia Marchetti
“Refugees in our case are not randomly located on the territory and forced to stay there, which often fuels anti-migrant feelings among the population,” says Luigi Andreini, the non-profit’s president. “Here, all the towns [in the] area have approved and take part in the integration project.”
In addition to tucking into dishes from crisis areas around the world, visitors can stay in “La Tinaia.” The small bed-and-breakfast installed in what was once the farm’s grape fermentation cellar costs €25 per person per night. The bright rooms have an ethnic design with patchwork covers and handmade wooden furniture.
The hotel and eatery generates revenue for the town, as it teaches migrant women how to adapt their cooking to Italian patrons and provides them with the training — through food hygiene courses, for example — needed to work in the restaurant and catering industry in nearby towns.
The center also offers migrants well-attended courses in woodcutting, farming and sewing. “Our goal is to help them fully integrate in society and find a job, either with us or at nearby firms and farms, while their children attend local schools and drawing classes in the evening,” says Andreini.
A summer school class with both local and migrant children | Silvia Marchetti
The town is busiest in the summer. Groups of children take over the fields for organized activities and summer camps, and Tagi, the Ethiopian chef, serves up spaghetti with tomato sauce and fried meat balls (ingera is considered too spicy for children).
In the evenings, everyone meets to watch movies on an outdoor projector. Parents might have a pre-dinner drink. The kids look for shooting stars. Women from the nearby town of Borgo San Lorenzo get together with young girls from Syria and Ethiopia to bake bread and try out new recipes.
“Each migrant who has stayed here for a while has left us as a souvenir a recipe of his home country,” says Andreini.
Silvia Marchetti is a freelance journalist based in Rome.