Foreign Pupils, Bad Citizens - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 90

tion of non-italian pupils.” as was to be expected, the new text bore no formal
trace of its entirely fortuitous genesis, but City Councilor laura marsilio frankly
admitted that she had played a central part in its making: “look, i know it by
heart because it was i who wrote virtually all of the circular, side by side with the
minister” (marsilio 2011).
once the objective of imposing an obligatory cap on foreign children had
been achieved, one of Councilor laura marsilio's last public acts was the inaugu-
ration of the 2010/2011 school year. on 10 september, she arrived at the pisacane
school and publicly reasserted her conviction that “the children of immigrants
born in italy are not italians” and therefore it was right for them to be regarded
as foreigners (Corriere Roma 2010). even though the declaration aroused much
controversy, it was in complete accordance with the government's commitment
of 1 april 2009 not to make any distinction between “foreigners,” who were all
considered to be equally “inadequate.” Rampelli made another public statement
on 17 september, starting once again with the pisacane but ending up by speak-
ing of citizenship and ius soli, defining the latter as “a true presumption of su-
periority and thus a racist attitude. to oblige someone who was born in italy to
disown the roots of his own family and to foist on him a definition of 'italian' was
a clear example of racism” (Rampelli 2009b).
with this statement, the reconfiguring of the pisacane affair was complete:
a school abandoned by dozens of people from the lower middle class in Rome's
periphery and attended lately by immigrants' children becomes a symbol of how
to belong to the italian nation, or to a nation in general. according to the picture
that emerges from this affair, one does not “belong” because one shares learnt
values, principles, and cultural attitudes; one must belong where these values,
principles, and attitudes are inherited, transmitted by the blood line. a primary
school has become the basis for formulating a very general principle of belong-
ing for ethnic reasons, as opposed to any civic citizenship. Constrained between
obliging someone to belong and forbidding someone to belong, this principle ne-
glects one of the basic dimensions of western liberal identity: the possibility of
choosing where one wants to belong.
another pisacane?
The old stereotype of the district that portrayed the “marranella school” as a
source of potential peril for respectable people has acquired a new lease of life
from the presence of foreign pupils: the other (now the ethnic other) is lying in
ambush and wants to replace us, to take our place. in consequence, the ministe-
rial circular of 8 January 2010, although it did not sanction the breaking-up of
the classes at pisacane—given that most of the foreign children speak italian as
their mother tongue—certainly legitimizes (from the cultural perspective) some
practices that are now established in the institutional “filter” that prevents the