It’s back-to-school day on Lake Como, and the traffic is demented. The usually sedate town – you don’t come here to party, no matter how many times you may spot George Clooney on a Riva – has been roused from its long, summer slumber by an early Monday start and there’s an irascible jam along the waterfront. The breakfast show on 102.5 FM Sportiva blasts from windows and my friend Lucia sucks her teeth as we wind on foot through the cars. “Che STRESS.”
Hanging a left towards the San Giovanni station, we get a first glimpse of the camp of 300-plus migrants who have been gathering here since July, trying to get into Switzerland by train and move on to Germany. Repeatedly turned back by Swiss border guards, they return to Como and pitch tents and shelters on the slopes outside the station, before trying again – although in recent weeks over a hundred have got through.
Everywhere there is music coming from smartphones connected to the camp’s wifi, tuned in to radio stations in Ethiopia and Libya, Eritrea and Gambia. Young men lie out on towels and blankets. The wifi was pretty much the first thing that the local volunteer camp helpers got sorted, one of them tells me, access to radio and YouTube being an essential factor in keeping things relatively calm and optimistic – that and the great cauldrons of pasta.
Nobody here is going hungry, though plans to move everybody out of sight and into shipping containers near the town’s Cimitero Monumentale next week are making people nervous. Luba, 18, won’t tell me where he has travelled from, or how. From the way he says his name – too carelessly – I can tell he has plucked it out of the air.
“I am from Como,” he insists, quite furious, and then laughs suddenly, wanting to distract me, to talk about something lighter. “What colour is your car?” he asks, waving his phone with its radio station tuned to an old hits channel. Next to him, a boy has been rinsing his clothes in a bucket, and as he lays out a pair of wet socks to dry, we all rather awkwardly listen to Bryan Ferry singing “Don’t Stop the Dance”.
The female radio host sighs her appreciation of the crooner. “Che bello. Che stupendo. He looks Italian.”
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This article appears in the 15 Feb 2017 issue of the New Statesman, The New Times