In the ghetto of Milan: between colonial legacies, state lager, and red zones

Insight by Camilla Ponti

“Do we ask for a life without blemish? But when we judge our own lives, can we say that ours is without blemishes? [...] I think the statue should remain there." These are the words spoken by the mayor of Milan, Giuseppe Sala, in a video message posted on his Facebook profile, alongside an action carried out by the Rete Studenti Milano and LuMe towards the statue of Indro Montanelli, in the park of the same name, in June 2020. After covering it with red paint and writing at the base “racist rapist,” the request was to remove it. However, Sala refused.

Indro Montanelli was an Italian journalist and writer. So, what are the blemishes towards which Sala invites us to be lenient? Fascism, colonialism, slavery, rape, and pedophilia. Montanelli participated in the fierce Italian fascist colonial campaign in Ethiopia, during which he bought as a slave and married a twelve-year-old Eritrean girl, whom Montanelli calls Destà. In the column “From Montanelli's Room,” published in the Corriere della Sera, in an article dated February 12, 2000, Montanelli portrayed the girl’s age, stating that she was fourteen years old. Within the television program "L'ora della verità" from 1969, Montanelli proudly claims and celebrates the colonial practice of buying girls and young women as slaves from colonized populations."

The Indro Montanelli Park is an example of Milanese colonial odonomastics. Odonomastics is the branch of urban planning that studies the names of streets, squares, and avenues in a city. On the municipality's website, it is possible to find a map of the city that shows the numerous references to the Italian colonial legacy still present in the Milanese capital. While the Milanese mayor refers to crimes committed by white fascists as blemishes, the treatment reserved today in Italy for racialized people is quite different. In fact, Milan is one of ten Italian cities where the colonial baggage is expressed not only in the historical and cultural toponymic heritage but also in current places of racial segregation: the CPRs, or Centers for Permanence for repatriation.

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CPRs are total institutions, that are state-run places of confinement and absolute deprivation of personal freedom, within which administrative detention is exercised, a particular type of imprisonment used exclusively against migrant people and/or those not recognized as citizens, due to an administrative offense, namely being without valid documents. Thus, administrative detention involves deprivation of personal freedom in the absence of a crime.

Starting from the assumption that any form of imprisonment and total institution, including prison, must be surpassed and abolished, the fact that administrative detention is external to the criminal circuit and exempt from any law infringement clearly shows how it is an instrument of institutional racism. In fact, if the explicit purpose of CPRs is deportation, publicly called repatriation, the data on actual annual deportations, which hover around 50% of the total number of detained people, highlight how their primary and implicit function is actually to control and isolate migrant people and/or those not recognized as citizens. CPRs are not just prisons: they are State lager. The word "lager" means concentration camp, a place and condition of marginalization, segregation, and mistreatment. In CPRs, we witness the suspension of any type of right and a true legalization of State torture. The Mai più Lager - No ai Cpr network has been documenting since 2018 the devastating conditions to which people confined in CPRs are subjected and the daily institutional violence.

According to Nicola Cocco, an infectious disease doctor expert in detention medicine and a member of the Mai Più Lager - No ai Cpr network and the Italian Society of Migration Medicine, “CPRs and administrative detention represent the drain through which the sludge of systemic and institutional racism is emerging at the macro level, particularly in post-colonial societies that have never dealt with their post-coloniality, such as Italy. The ways in which CPRs express their pathogenicity can be developed along three axes: hygienic, health, and social degradation; suffering, inherent to the CPR itself; the regime of total abandonment reminiscent of Basaglia. These axes converge on a major vector: that of violence. The discourse of violence is so inherent to CPRs and administrative detention that it ranges from self-harm to violence “of” bodies and “on” bodies, reaching the violence of deportations themselves. This “topology of violence,” to use Han’s words, namely the ability of violence to express itself in multiple forms, leads me to consider administrative detention as one of the blades that constitutes the “structural violence” that still conditions the lives of colonized, marginalized, and racialized people. Obviously, given that confinement in CPRs is a form of necropolitics, it has enormous impacts on the mental, physical, and social health of incarcerated individuals."

Necropolitics, a term coined by the Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe, refers to all those forms of post-colonial domination that aim to select, through legal, political, and social practices - both direct and indirect - the categories of people who must be left to die and/or killed directly, as they are inconvenient or undesirable. Incarceration within CPRs is one of the highest expressions of necropolitics, as it entails a concrete exposure to both real and symbolic social death for the individuals confined. Through the implementation of colonial methodologies at home, State lager rely on maintaining an incessant state of terror and oppression and a perpetual condition of pain and stagnation. For the functioning of our legal system, CPRs, like any lager, are non-places where the State of exception ceases to be a temporary suspension of the rule of law and becomes a stable, integrated, and permanent space-time organization within the community.

Regarding the influence of CPRs on the city and citizenship, Sofia Franchini, a PhD student in social anthropology who wrote a thesis for the Master's in Migration and Diaspora Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London titled “And yet, no one sees it. Cohabiting with immigration detention in Milan, Italy”, believes that “CPRs, despite being isolated from the territories in which they are located, profoundly condition the space around them. The CPR on Via Corelli in Milan is situated in a transit area, where movement is encouraged; it is striking the number of people who pass by without knowing what lies ahead. I reflected on the movement around Corelli in comparison to another way of occupying space: drawing. Drawing means stopping at a point, and around a place like Corelli, those who stop are immediately identified by the authorities as suspicious, dangerous. CPRs are often defined as ‘black holes’ due to the scarcity and difficulty in obtaining information, and the sense of despair they impose on those confined. Wanting to take the astrophysical metaphor in its literal sense, my research leads me to suggest that the CPR, like a black hole, profoundly alters the space around it and the way bodies are compelled to circulate around it. Confined individuals must be immobile. There is a fundamental connection between movement and gaze, where people often see but do not notice. All of this occurs under the watchful eye of authority: cameras, law enforcement. Outside, everything is hidden. You only see a wall. Ending up in a CPR is one of the worst things that can happen to you in life. And those who control it cannot be unaware of this."

The control of movement is a fundamental practice of colonial culture. To this day, within the city of Milan, it manifests not only through explicit sites of racial segregation and incarceration, such as the CPR, but also through the presence of red zones. Red zones are urban perimeters, established during the Christmas period and currently extended until March 31, 2025, where access and presence are prohibited for individuals considered dangerous or troublesome, or those who have been reported- not investigated or convicted - for certain types of crimes. This means that police have the power to stop, identify, and sanction individuals at their discretion based on what they deem to be decent or not.

In a city where simply being a racialized person can put your life at risk, as seen with the murder of Ramy Elgalm, it is clear that red zones continue racist and classist policies aimed at the segregation and consequent control of certain groups of people. In fact, racial profiling is at the core of the stops carried out by the police. Red zones also represent a further step in a securitarian and repressive strategy aimed at dismantling and criminalizing gatherings of marginalized people. It is no coincidence that they have been established not only in Piazza Duomo and the Navigli area but also around Milan’s three major stations: Centrale, Rogoredo, and Garibaldi, known as primary spaces where homeless people, especially in winter, find shelter.

Despite its facade of inclusivity, it is evident that Milan is a city where colonial practices, both past and present, are still preserved and perpetuated. Globally, especially following the intensification of the genocide against the Palestinian people, more and more individuals are coming together to build collective realities based on decolonial values, demonstrating that dismantling colonial and white supremacist culture is difficult but possible. According to Dalia Ismail, an Italian-Palestinian activist, “To deconstruct and reject colonial principles, we must first understand history, the colonial past of our own country, become aware of it, and take responsibility, both individually and collectively. Statues like that of Montanelli in Milan must be torn down, park and street names dedicated to colonizers must be changed, because otherwise, the truth of what happened and the crimes committed are erased. Memory must be preserved and maintained, but it must be a memory that condemns, not one that glorifies. Nazi extermination camps have been preserved as a warning about what happened. Museums could be created to tell the story of Italy’s colonial past and the atrocities it committed, spaces could be established to condemn while simultaneously remembering the people this country colonized. Without memory, the past repeats itself. We see it every day with the genocide in Palestine. We study it in school when the extermination of Indigenous peoples is referred to as the ‘discovery of America.’ There is no collective memory of what European colonizers did in those lands—we are talking about pure denialism. To embrace decolonial principles, one must start with deep self-reflection. And often, white and Western people do not want to do this, because it would mean losing the privileges they have always taken for granted.”