Soumaila Sacko's fellow workers protesting at his death in Calabria (taken by https://www.facebook.com/InfoMigrants/)
It was Saturday, June 2, the Republic Day in Italy, which celebrates the country’s abolition of the monarchy in 1946. Streets were mostly empty in the morning. Local folk were taking a rest at home on this traditionally leisurely national holiday. I was in Marsala, the west Sicilian town known for Giuseppe Garibaldi’s one-thousand-men landing on their mission to conquer the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860 and the eventual unification of Italy.
On this day, as local people got ready to have their pasta lunch with families, a parallel world moved at an entirely different pace only a few miles away. Out there in the vast green fields that surround the town, Sanji and other Gambian workers were working under the fierce sun, over 30 degrees, on this early summer day. They were tidying up weeds and looking after the thriving vineyards, growing bigger and thicker by the week.
