Thousands of Italian Albanians gathered today in Milan, where the next meeting of Prime Minister Rama’s European tour took place, where Albanians have been living and working for decades.
“You Albanians in Italy are the most radiant example of the Albanian vanguards of reunification with Europe, you are the Albanian pride, embodied in an inspiring success of our national mission to meet with the democratic Europe.” – Prime Minister Rama addressed the audience.
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Dear brothers and sisters, Albanians in Italy, I am deeply touched by your hospitality!
I want you to know that I have been extremely moved by the warm wave of greetings and invitations from many Albanians who have written to me all these days, in fact immediately after the meeting in Athens, to visit them where they are, on all four sides of Italy.
Thank you all!
Most of those who wrote to me are probably here too. Thank you for your presence! But many, many others are far away in the cities, in other towns of this friendly country.
Endless gratitude for the great desire to meet me and a hug to everyone wherever they are from this wonderful arena, where the red and black flags and the Italian tricolor testify with all the beauty of simplicity, the eternal bond between two peoples who among dozens of centuries have united a whole sea of history, in this Mediterranean basin where the spirit of today’s Europe was conceived.
You, the Albanians in Italy, are the most radiant example of the Albanian vanguards of reunification with Europe. You, not politics, not the media, not the private business, are the main unifiers of the two shores of the Adriatic in a single space of universal relations.
You are the greatest force for the return of the old Arberia and the new Albania to the natural bed of European civilization.
You, who were yesterday Albanian immigrants and are today equal citizens of Europe, are the Albanian pride embodied in an inspiring success for our national mission to unite with democratic Europe.
Today, this seems the most natural thing in the world, but yesterday, it seemed the most impossible thing in the world. When you became the bearers of the shocking beginning of this historic mission, on the rusty ships of communist Albania, where as the traveler and historian of the 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, would have said if he had seen you, you shaped a body that looked like an Albanian giant.
“E stato un albanese”. Surely all those who have set foot in Italy in the 90s remember this alarm bell.
“E stato un albanese”, was the sound that pierced the ear of the person who heard it, tore the eye when it was read, crushed the soul, and lowered the head of Albanians in every environment, where the Albanian should not just hide, but if possible, forget about being Albanian in order to be accepted as an ordinary man.
Two cars collided; the newspapers wrote “E stato un albanese”
A robbery took place, the local tele-newspapers reported: “E stato un albanese”.
A murder was committed, the national tele-newspapers began with the news “E stato un albanese”.
I heard it with my own ears when “Telegiornale” was reporting from the scene of a crime. The reporter with microphone in hand and police car lights rolling in the night background reported:
“L’assassino e scapato e non e stato identificato. Ma ce la quasi certezza delle forze del ordine che e stato un Albanian.” Even when he fled in an unknown direction, the unknown killer was “un albanese”.
This was the Albanian in the Italian mirrors of those years. At that time, the Italians had no way of knowing that before Albanians touched the shores of Italy, the spirit of the Albanians echoed from the “liberta” and from the “felicita” of Albano and Romina.
Your chest heaved from the noise that came to their homes from the Serie A stadiums and it seemed as if they had a part of the ‘82 World Cup as well. Their minds were like a warehouse of stolen items from the illegal waves of Italian television programs, where they had inserted every Celentano album; every trophy of San Remo, every advertisement of Carusello, every dress of Raffaella, every character of the soap operas of RAI and Mediaset.
The Italians had no idea that beyond that human exodus from the abyss of the Dantesque hell of communism across the Adriatic, and the appearance of the Albanians who suddenly began to appear in the streets of Italy like those films about the Middle Ages, was hidden an Italian spirit more Italian than the most ardent Italian; an adoration to the point of self-denial of an Italy that in the minds of the Albanians was a holy land where the paradise of this world was found; an unconditional blind love, which left nothing lacking to all the greatest platonic loves, but the biggest misfortune was that at the same time Albania in the eyes of Italy looked like a television screen where lights had went out, black, illegible, surrounded by the darkness of half a century.
In the eyes of the Italians of the 90s, nothing connected Albania before the war, the former province of Italy whose memory had been thrown into the garbage of the Italian history of fascism, with communist Albania, and who does not remember those times with the stamp: “E’ stato un albanese”, when the debates were boiling on the Italian political channels. It was the time of a certain Umberto Bossi, a guy who called for Albanians to be killed in the sea with army rifles, a character who looked like he had come out of comic films, who made Italy a mess here, and went there, bought the son’s degree in one of those universities of the old Albania.
There was a time when the bay of Vlora became the parking lot of water speed races for speedboats that raced at night in the darkness of the channel of Otranto, where everyone saw death with their eyes. For some of them, death sent them forever to the bottom of the sea and others beat death in an unimaginable twist and gained freedom by finally touching the shore of their dreams.
It was the time of the sinking of the “Katërtit të Radës”, the ship that became the symbol of the struggle of the Albanians returning to the bosom of Europe after a violent uprooting and endless darkness after the Second World War, but the Italy of the time was fortunately not the Greece of that time. Not only the Italian people, like the Greek people, generously opened the door to the Albanians, helping them to get back on their feet, but the Italian governments, although very frightened by the newly emerging phenomenon of mass migration to the shores of Italy, treated Albania like no other.
Sisters and brothers, I told you that I received many messages from Albanians in Italy, after that red and black dance in the heart of Greece. I was impressed on more than one occasion, the messengers from Italy telling me that when I came to Milan I should not forget that you too have suffered, it almost seemed as if they felt excluded from a race of historical pains. Almost jealous of the fact that the terrible suffering of the Albanians of Greece makes the arduous history of the Albanians’ approach to Europe and their affirmation as European citizens more heroic than all the others. They also shared sad stories in their messages, stories that are impossible to fit into the picture of Europe, freedom, and human rights. They are stories that have their place in some very gloomy landscapes of the human soul. They are not related to the territories of great wounds from open wars, but from the silent suffering, from the secret conflicts of a time when the traumas of trying to adapt and be accepted as suitable were simply called necessities of the integration process.
That was a time when the European democratic union did not have the name of the common project of Europe where we live today. But time passes by! We Albanians are equally responsible for the progress of the fate of that ethnic project for the common future of the inhabitants of this continent in the path of our indivisible European destinies, where the states of democratic Europe, succeed together as Europeans without distinction.
Germany called it reunification from the first minute and came out on top without waiting or asking for the East Germans to become suitable in a long process with criteria, and standards, but also with political games dictated by the next elections across Europe.
While the European Union had to drag on for years with the so-called enlargement until Russian Tsarism reappeared, opening the first war of conquest in this continent after 77 years and making Europe begin to understand more that it should be reunited as soon as possible, through the bridges of democracy, not expanded with the tortoise’s step through the channels of bureaucracy.
You Albanians in Italy did not change your names, but again and again, as happened tragically to hundreds of thousands of our brothers and sisters in Greece for a single and honorable reason that we all know very well and that will remain a stain of shame in the history of democratic Europe, but there were not a few cases when you voluntarily undertook this change of identity so that the haunting bell of “e stato un albanese” did not open any hell. A Drita was reborn as a Lucia, but perhaps the extraordinary theoretical knowledge of Italy, without having stepped on it yet, combined with the practical necessity of hiding the traces of being Albanian during that terrible impact of the media mirrors, explains the self-transforming power that made hundreds of thousands of Albanians in Italy adapt with an impressive speed, achieving rare successes in the world of Albanian emigration from the first generation of newcomers.
Maybe the blind power of platonic love for Italy transformed into the inner strength of revenging that alarm bell “e stato un albanese” which every time it was heard, pushed the Albanians harder to prove to Italy: “No, non sono stato io” transformed that great movement to the fertile ground of a community which, not only won the war against prejudices, but brought forth and climbed its stars to the once dreamiest peaks of Italy, the Sanremo balcony, the temple of La Scala, the Amici spectacle, the podium of the winner of the Voice of Italy, the leaders of the Serie A teams, the covers of books by Einaud and Feltrinelli, at the Venice Biennale and through the walls of prestigious fine arts galleries, and in every corner of the province and municipality, where alongside the Italians, the Albanians shone with their extraordinary talents, feats and will.
“Tu proverai siccome sa di sale lo pane altrui, e quant’e’ duro calle lo scendere e salir le altrui scale” is written in one of the poems of the Divine Comedy, precisely where his ancestor Cacciaguida, the prophet tells Dante a prophecy that he will have a life in exile like the one he himself had gone through. That song looks like it was written for Albanians in Italy, when it says “you will taste it, like the taste of salt in someone else’s bread, what a pain it is to go down and climb someone else’s stairs”.
“Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta più caramente; e questo è quello strale che l’arco de lo essilio pria saetta.”
You Albanians of Italy experienced the unbelievable, when you shed tears of longing for Albania, which you had left with an extreme vow never to see again, and hot tears of anger for Italy, which you had sought with extreme faith, expecting that it would never wet your face with the salty water of your eyes.
But right there on that very narrow path, between the cursed homeland, and the second homeland here that crashed on you like crazy, being trampled and overturned together with the bag of your dreams, you found the safest homeland: yourself.
You discovered within yourself the unstoppable strength to chase your future without ever giving up, clutching your self-belief just as Dante clutched his hand of Virgil. Virgil is the one who left humanity with the story of the inexhaustible creative force of immigrants, through the main character of his masterpiece “Aeneid”.
Aeneid, the refugee who escaped from the fires and horrors of the Trojan war, stops in our Butrint to learn his fate, and precisely in Butrint, the little Troy, – as Virgil calls it, – Aeneid learns his fate through a prophecy. At the end of a dangerous journey, you will create the glorious Rome.
Beyond the myth, Virgil’s narrative reveals to us that every political castle is built with stones gathered from the layers of time, every identity has its origin, and every community created by politics as a legal entity on the bed of geography, it is nothing but a rejuvenating mixture of elements, which at one age or another have been interwoven in the embrace of those who came before and those who came after. Even in this Mediterranean basin of ours, you Albanians of Italy and those of Greece are today one of the significant images of a common prophecy, the establishment of a new European civilization, freer, fairer, and more inclusive than his Greek and Roman predecessors, whose bitter end teaches anyone how even the most seemingly steely political realities can crumble like sandcastles when the thirst for power sacrifices shared human values and turns the challenging uphill toward the future into the destructive downhill of the past.
Before bidding farewell to Eleni and Andromache in Butrint, Aeneid, in the vision of civilization that would bring prosperity to other parts of Italy, dreamed that brothers in spirit and love, the peoples of the whole area would build a single homeland, mixed and subjected to a common fate on the border between east and west, mixed and superimposed on each other, we have had our histories in this area.
One of the most significant images of that mixture is that of the time when the Albanian nobility gained Venetian citizenship, along with the right of representation, and when our Skanderbeg became the flag of the West’s resistance to the fury coming from the East, we were honored by the Seat of Holy with the great title of “Athlete of Christ”, but on the other hand, the fact that our national hero was also a loyal warrior of the king of Naples with whom he was bound by the pact that paved the way for the consolidation of an Albanian community since Apulia to Sicily, where the language of Skanderbeg is preserved in 51 Italian municipalities today. From those old tree roots, great families and distinguished individuals emerged over the centuries, who left their mark on the history of Italy; Albanians from whom an Albanian Pope emerged, the Durrazzos of Genoa, and many others.
You, the Albanians of Italy, broke the umbilical cord with the motherland through the same sea where our ancient ancestors, the Arbërs, saw that umbilical cord snapped with the strength of resentment against the dictatorship of poverty and with the hands of your dreams for Europe of prosperity with their nightmare swords.
Unlike you, who are today’s children of Skanderbeg, who only a few years after being away from Albania started to return to relive the streets of their homeland, they, the brothers and sisters of Gjergj Kastrioti, crossed centuries without being able to touch it again while their eyes longed.
Arbëria died after a long languor far from their eyes and was revived with the name of Albania and a new flag, while the Arbërian lands of Italy remained the chest of clothes, candles and the memory of Arbëria, covered with the old flag of legend and of the history of our National Hero.
On the other hand, the historical traces of Italy in Albania, where Julius Caesar challenged Pompey, are also very significant; where Naples, Amalfi and Venice brought merchants and architects, erected churches and buildings; where the castle of Rozafa of Shkodra became the symbol of the Venetian resistance against the Ottoman power and was immortalized in the painting of the Renaissance genius, Italian Paolo Veronese, which stands today in the hall of the Great Council in Venice.
Those traces stretched through the body of Albania throughout the centuries, until the place where the urban plan of the Florentine architects came to life, on which the first stone of modern Tirana was laid, and then where the violent embrace of Albania and Italy’s fascists, squeezed between the history of a great Adriatic power that had seen our motherland as a sister and the megalomaniacal power of an Italy blinded by old imperial dreams, a serious wound was opened from which the glory of the anti-fascist war remained, which today is in the historical assembly of the main boulevard of Albania.
Dear compatriots,
In you, Albanians of Italy and all of Europe, I see the expression of a great emigrant, St. Paul, who crossed the Mediterranean with such vicissitudes as only you can, with mind and body, until he brought the Good Word of God’s love to this blessed land of Italy, after proclaiming it, as he himself testifies, throughout Illyria:
“I fought the right battle; I never stopped running; I kept the faith; I am only waiting for what belongs to me, the crown of justice”.
Today, here in Italy, you are nearly 700,000 residents with a regular residence permit, and more than a third of you, nearly a quarter of a million, are citizens with Italian passports and the right to vote in the democratic decision-making of this country.
Three-fifths of you are concentrated here, in the developed Italian north. 10% of the total businesses created by those who came to Italy from outside the European Union are yours, and the Albanian enterprises that contribute their taxes to the Italian state are over 40,000.
Albanian students in Italian universities are also about 10% of all foreign students from outside the EU countries and among all foreign student communities in Italy, the Albanian ranks among those with the best results.
421,000 of you will benefit from the newly concluded pension agreement with Italy, where thanks to the personal commitment of your prime minister in Italy, an unyielding friend of Albania and a very strong spokesperson for us in the European Union, Giorgia Meloni, we succeeded in establishing, after a long but tireless effort of ten years, a precious and missing stone, in that crown of justice that you have fully deserved with your love, with your efforts and with your contributions to this second homeland of yours, where you forever silenced the bell of the terrible prejudice “e stato un albanese”, which accompanied you in the arduous uphill of sacrifices towards your triumph, like the young Europeans of Italy.
Today I have come to you, to tell you that Albania is now, like you, winning its battle for justice, without stopping the run and keeping the faith steadfast, in search of the missing crown of justice for its name, its flag, its place with God, by law and tradition, in the family of European states.
I keep telling to my European colleagues that it is true that we are not yet in the European Union, but we are Europeans in the middle of Europe, equal in honor and dignity with all others, from London to Warsaw, from Stockholm to Athens, the Albanians have been assigned as all the Europeans by the same God, and the legacy of Skënderbeu, of the renaissance, of the martyrs of Albanianism, while throughout this continent, you are the first to impose that the Albanians are a part of Europe.
Just as you freed the name “Albanian” here in Italy from that terrible cage of humiliating prejudices, today our Albania has also come out of that cage, where until a few years ago it was looked down upon, treated, at best, as a mysterious creature and at worst as an inferior being, filled with the fleas of all evils, a dangerous place impenetrable by the law, enveloped in dust, possessed by dust that made all Albanians in Europe, which made you here in Italy blush when the name “Albania” was spoken.
But today, the day has come when everyone around you, in the neighborhood, at work, wherever, when you say Albania to them, they say “I can’t wait to go on vacation” and the day has come when if someone who looks at you crookedly, you have every reason to look at him with your head up and say “C’e qualcosa?”
For many years it was you, the Albanians of Italy and all of Europe, who kept Albania afloat with remittances for your families. Today it is Albania’s turn to make you proud, when you talk about your homeland or when Italians and other Europeans talk about Albania.
“Achilles, Achilles, its swift feet run the shores of the sea…”
This sentence is taken from the Iliad, it was pronounced in a low voice, by an Albanian who in 1943 suffered exile in Ventottene as an anti-fascist. “In Ventottene, – writes Altiero Spinelli, one of the fathers of the United Europe project – he was naturally close to ex-communists and socialists with whom he often talked about the evil of Stalin’s regime or whispered the words of Plato that he read in Greek, seeking the evocation of his soul. During the night of July 25-26, 1943″, Spinelli confesses, “while they were locked in the barracks, the word spread that Mussolini had resigned. The next morning, all the internees found themselves in the square to listen to the Duce’s dismissal announcement on the radio. For a moment we were stunned. The first to break the silence was the Albanian Zai Fundo, perhaps because he was not Italian, his emotion was less strong and he shouted: “Viva l’Italia libera” and this call was then accepted by everyone.
Afterwards, Zai Fundo returned to Albania, but Albania was not ready for his vision, ideas, and ambition which led him to the grave long before his time, the boy was in love with Plato and his homeland, but was disappointed by the communists, who had seized the power of all Albanians with the violence of the dictatorship.
Albania had to not only get out of the fruitless communist regime but also go through the exhausting ranges of a “God forbid” transition to finally reappear on the shores of the European Mediterranean as a state with a voice, with its own dignity, which today welcomes friends from all over Europe, from the millions and millions of Europeans who come to visit it every year, to the highest dignitaries, who they see Albania as the small Europe of the still troubled Balkans.
Next year, Albania will host in Tirana all the leaders of the new European political community, from the United Kingdom to Ukraine and Moldova, from Norway to Turkey, from Portugal to Azerbaijan.
Who could have imagined until a few years ago this Albania today, in the big European arena, which looks more and more like all of you in the big European family, but Albania today also awaits you, the Albanians of Italy and the whole world, as your hometown that is reborn and that is finally becoming the state that the Albanians of Albania have missed so much.
Some mouths, from those you know well, said these days that I should not come here because under my leadership, 1 million Albanians have fled from Albania. This “1 million Albanians” who fled in the last 10 years, is a big, evil, and shameful lie, just like the one about the buses coming from Tirana, which came out of those dirty mouths, insulting the high patriotic honor and dignity of the Albanians of Greece, who melted like a river into the sea in that red and black embrace of Athens, to show love, to express longing, to manifest their pride for Albanianness and for Albania.
Yes, it is true, many Albanians have fled in these 10 years. It is true, but “Albania crumbled in 1.5 million inhabitants”, “Albania of the narco-state”, “Albania drowned in the sea of corruption”, “Albania where there is neither work nor hope” – is an Albania that exists only in the abyss of those mouths, which haunt the land of Albania’s children since Albania declared its independence in 1912 and since that day, the most wicked of Albania’s enemies have come from among its own ranks.
It is very true. Albania still has a big fight with corruption, crime, and other wounds inherited, not only from the decade of transition, but from centuries of violent separation from Europe.
But with all its problems, Albania where justice was kept tied like a hunting dog, Albania where more than 100 people were killed every year and where policemen pushed cars that ran out of gas on the roads, Albania where tourism was kept only of patriotism and where there were more piles of uncollected garbage on the streets than tourists, Albania where you had to cross the sea to go get a document and then you couldn’t leave the ferry terminal without paying the next policeman, – has died.
Today Albania has won the trust of the world and deserves the trust of every Albanian. The faith of every Albanian like you who knows very well that nothing can be achieved without effort, without sacrifice, without patience.
And who better than you, the Albanians of Greece, Italy, Europe, know the truth, which is as simple as it is impossible to understand by anyone who has not experienced the weight of work on his shoulders, has not known disappointments, has not felt the pain of sacrifices, has not passed the trials of patience. Whoever believes in today’s Albania, tomorrow’s Albania will return their faith many times over!
I will cite some lines for you. These are words taken from the Panegyric of Emperor Anastas Durrsaku:
“Fate, as if it had predicted the future, gave you the homeland that passes to others out of happiness. Because Epidamni, (Durres) is sung by the writers and with them it is famous as a city that extends from the land to the sea and that is inhabited in each of the two and that has a surplus of what the land and the sea can produce. Because here it is possible for people to be at the same time inhabitants of the island and of the continent while staying away from the evils that come from both, rejoicing as one as the other.”
But unlike those who come from the sea, from the land, from the air and whom today’s Albania welcomes with its legendary generosity, for every foreigner at the threshold of the Albanian’s house, you come today to an Albania that is very different from that that you left. Obviously Albania today is a home where there are still many things to put in place and a lot of work to finish, but do not forget, there are also many opportunities for anyone who returns with knowledge, experience, with his savings, he will earn more for himself and his family,
And the other, the one who returns sooner will have more years ahead of him in peace, but you are not forced to choose one or the other between the two, Italy and Albania, because today you have the opportunity to belong to both, not as before, here with work and troubles, there with love and family, but also with love and work both here and there!
No one knows the word work better than you, no one knows more than you the knowledge of hard work, sweat, money earned and saved with many sacrifices.
Therefore, no one better than you could succeed with work, strength, and courage to increase the economy of his family with effort, investing there, in the land that brought you to the sea as a foreigner, but which is and will remain your homeland.
Albania’s good times have finally arrived, sisters and brothers, and only we Albanians inside and outside its borders, inside and outside the borders of politics, inside and outside the borders of the possible can and will make this time, a time that will be marked in the history of our country as your time was marked in the history of Albanians in Europe, the time of final reunification with the European family.
“I came to Durrës for the reason that this is a free and loyal city to me and located close to Italy”, – Cicero wrote as early as the time of Rome and this is how the leaders of Italy who find there a proud place and a country loyal to Italy with whom our relations are those of friendship, respect and special partnership.
Today, nearly 20,000 Italians live in Albania, and their number increases every week, as reported by Italian sources. Meanwhile, nearly 1000 Italian young men and women study in Albania. The number of Italian businesses has increased and is approaching 3000. Meanwhile, more and more Italians come to Tirana for the weekend.
You know better than anyone, let alone the media and cafes in Albania, how much your life here in Italy has become more expensive, how significantly the uncertainty for tomorrow has increased.
And in the meantime, I have only one invitation to extend to all Albanians who work in hotel-tourism or in various services here or in Europe.
Get informed directly, not from screens, not from channels filled with political bile and fake news.
Find out what the salaries of the service sector in Albania really are, how much someone who works in the hotel industry really earns, I assure you that who comes armed with the knowledge of so many professions and trades, for which the development of Albania today needs so much, will earn a lot.
And with the greatest gratitude for the patience with which you listened to me, because I speak at length, I want to close with a word taken from a dedication, that there is no place, no occasion better to cite than today.
I share with you the dedication of the acts of the Council of Arbër in July 1703, where Monsignor Vincenc Zmajević wrote to the Holy Father, Pope Clement XI, the Albanian son of the Albanian family: “You ordered me, O Holy Father, the Pope, to visit and notice as an apostolic visitor the churches of Albania, my land under your shadow, holy Father Pope, the land of Albania is rejoicing, because after many years it is catching its breath and opening its eyes. This Albania, which for some time has been forgotten and covered by the fog, under an Albanian Pope is coming to the light, and cannot wait to gain the name and happiness of the motherland, please please, O Blessed Father, our prayers, the most humbled honor and the joy of my Albania, even better to say, your Albania”.
May God be with you always, with your families, relatives, and friends!
Long live Albania and Albanians!
Viva l’Italia e vivani gli italiani!
Once again a greeting from a wave of flags to all those who see us around Europe.
Thank you very very much!
