Tribune. On September 30, 2021, Domenico Lucano, former mayor of the small town of Riace (Calabria), was sentenced to thirteen years and two months in prison, with a fine of 750,000 euros.
Who is Domenico Lucano? He is a citizen of a village in southern Italy which, twenty years ago, was abandoned to the clutches of the ‘Ndrangheta (the local mafia) and abandoned by its inhabitants, forced to go north to find work.
What is the story of Domenico Lucano? 1er July 1998 a Kurdish migrant boat runs aground on Riace beach. Homeless inhabitants arrive in a village where the houses no longer have inhabitants. Domenico Lucano then succeeds in contacting the owners of the houses in Riace to whom he asks permission to open the doors of their empty homes. Little by little, Riace is becoming the city of hospitality.
Having become mayor of Riace, he developed a model of hospitality and the small Calabrian town experienced a renaissance and revived ancestral know-how such as hand weaving and olive oil pressing. Domenico Lucano saved lives, created hope, rebuilt a lost city.
The condemnation that strikes him is heavy, exaggerated and out of the ordinary.
Conviction and ideal
To use the words of his lawyer, “Domenico Lucano is foreign to the accusations which concern him, because by nature he is incapable of acting for gain, even political gain; as evidenced by the fact that he refused to be elected to the European Parliament, which would have allowed him to benefit from the immunity linked to the mandate of MEP. Domenico Lucano acted as representative of the State and interpreter of the Constitution, confronted that he was with the resignation of the public services which proved incapable of giving assistance and protection to the migrants. If, as mayor, he went beyond what he could do, it is certainly not for power, but out of conviction and to pursue an ideal, to respond to what our Constitution demands ”.
We express our full support for Domenico Lucano because this condemnation does not target him personally but aims, as he himself says, “The idea of an alternative life, which has given birth to a city that was dying”, it is a sentence against a model of life for a campaign which is depopulating; a model that can certainly be improved, but which has shown that welcoming and living together is possible, a model which shows that mutual aid can be the solution to the migration crisis, but also the solution to the economic crisis of a community which is in dying out.
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