Until a few weeks ago, Lampedusa’s main street was full of tourists, sitting at the hundreds of cafe tables that lined the pedestrian walkway. But now that winter is coming, most of the tables have been removed, and most people have left.
For Michele Cappadona and Vincenzo Lombardo, two friends who have been meeting here for the past 30 years, the quiet isn’t unusual. On a warm and windy afternoon, with the wind blowing in from the south, they take their seats outside a bar and begin their usual commentary on the news.
“Michele, did you hear about Palestine and Israel?” Vincenzo asks.
“Oh, I don’t know, Vince. Always something bad around the corner,” Michele replies.
“Poor them. Children, innocent souls,” Vincenzo says before declaring of both the Hamas fighters who attacked communities in southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli military which has responded by attacking and invading the Gaza Strip: “They are all criminals, assassins.”
These are words Vincenzo has repeated many times over the years, usually to critique people in power he blames for not doing enough to stop human suffering.
When they first met more than 30 years ago, Vincenzo was a strong working man in his 40s with a deep Christian faith. Michele was in his 20s; smaller, lame as a result of childhood polio and with a rather more cynical perspective on religion.
Born on the island in 1959, Michele moved to Naples as a one-year-old when his parents discovered he had polio. He stayed there, living in a specialist clinic, at first with his parents and then by himself, until he was a teenager and the doctors declared that his treatment had come to an end. In 1975, he returned to Lampedusa to live with his parents and complete his secondary school education.
He remembers first spotting Vincenzo a few years later from the window of his room. Vincenzo had recently returned from Turin, where he had been working at the Fiat car company, and started working as a dustman.
Michele would “see him every morning”. Then, one day, he says, “We met somehow”. He thinks it was at a cafe, but he cannot recall which one.
“Vince, do you remember where we met the first time?” Michele asks, repeating the question more loudly for his friend who is now almost deaf.
“Oh, I see,” Vincenzo finally answers. “I don’t know, it must have been somewhere, maybe at the Amicizia cafe? Anyway, who cares? It doesn’t matter.”
“I only remember that we liked each other,” Michele says with a smile. “It was a very spontaneous thing. And the next day or the day after, we decided to meet again. Since then, we have been meeting here, in Via Roma, pretty much every day. There it is. This is our story. As simple as that.”
Michele, who has never had a job and receives a modest disability pension, says his whole life has been lived in the shadow of his disability. Before he met Vincenzo, he says, he felt as though he was living on the margins of society. “People, you know, how they are. Always judging,” he says. “They see one who cannot work or use his strength as they do, and they turn their back to you. But Vincenzo was different. He didn’t care about that.”
In death, ‘we are all the same’
In 1996, Vincenzo took a job as a graveyard keeper. When he accepted the role, he had little idea that he would have to bury the bodies of people who had died at sea while trying to reach Lampedusa. But soon after he started, bodies started to be found off the island’s shores.
Nobody knew what to do with the first bodies that were retrieved. With no formal processing system in place, Vincenzo stepped in to take care of them. “What did Jesus say? What you do to my brother, you do it to me,” he says.
He continued doing this up until his retirement in 2007, writing whatever information he could find about the migrants and refugees he buried in a register.
The oldest document the registry office in Lampedusa has is dated April 25, 1996, and identifies the deceased as an “unknown non-EU citizen, possibly Tunisian, between 25 and 30 years old, wearing a ring with the initial letter of his name. His name was Mustafa.”
Vincenzo tried to give the dead he buried some dignity by making wooden crosses that he would erect, adding a number according to his own records and praying for the deceased every day.
He complains that Europe has shown no serious intention of stopping refugees and migrants from dying at sea or of providing “any dignity to the dead and their families”.
One thing he is grateful for, however, is that he never had to bury a child who had died at sea. “I think that I would have given up,” he says.
The anger Vincenzo feels towards those in power is palpable. He calls it a “travesty” that the world has normalised a situation where thousands of people are left to die in the Mediterranean. “Governments do not care about their lives. Nobody cares,” he says.
For Vincenzo, the living may be treated very differently, but in death, we are “all the same”.
The view from the end of the road
From one end of Via Roma, Michele and Vincenzo watch the coastguard or Guardia di Finanza (Italy’s antismuggling agency) boats approaching the Favaloro pier, where most small boat landings take place in Lampedusa.
From this spot, they have a clear view and notice some rescue boats in the distance, full of people wrapped in thermic blankets.
“Do you think this is right?” Michele asks. “Crammed like that? And how many are still dying? Yesterday, or the day before, six died.”
These days, such deaths no longer make it to the global news. Nor is there much coverage of the refugees and migrants who do make it to shore or of the conditions they endure at the “welcome” centre where they are detained.
Michele and Vincenzo are not particularly surprised by this. They have become used to observing how the world’s attention shifts so easily from one tragedy to the next.
“It is always the same. They come, they talk, and they leave. But no worries, at least we stay here to watch these awful situations,” Vincenzo says.
A never-ending story
In September, Lampedusa did hit the front pages again – albeit fleetingly. National and international newspapers wrote about an “invasion” of thousands of refugees and migrants fleeing from Tunisia.
The number of people who landed in Lampedusa had reached 5,000 or 6,000 in a few days, according to the humanitarian organisations working inside the island’s “reception centre”.
“Yes, they were all there, at the dock. Hundreds of them. There, without water and food,” Michele says, describing how people were left to lie on the pavement under the hot sun. When most of the refugees and migrants were transferred elsewhere in Sicily, the news reporters went away.
But Vincenzo and Michele remain, watching and talking as they have for the past 30 years. “You will always find us here … For as long as we are on this Earth,” Michele explains. Then they return to their earlier conversation, debating the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“They talk about peace. Peace, how to make peace if they keep bombing and playing at war?” Michele says. “And then, can you imagine how many more will come? How many more immigrants? This story will never end, it will never end.”
It is almost 6pm and Vincenzo has pills to take. So the two friends say goodbye. They will meet again the next day to continue their conversation.
“You know how it is,” says Michele with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. “There is the good and the bad, but the bad always wins. Because that one is stronger than the other, and it will always be.”