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Published in la REPUBBLICA

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Many immigrants from Africa are employed in the tomato harvest of south Italy. This is a hard working job, often underpaid and hardly ever under a contract.

Immigrants who work in this area remain nomads as they change place every two or three months. They have no fixed residence and often camp in the slums near the plantations or in abandoned ruins in the countryside, without electricity and running water. The most critical situation is during the winter when work decreases and the weather conditions become unbearable to face for the homeless people. There have been cases of death among the workes, both Italian and Africans, due to the critical conditions of the work they do and the poor living conditions.

I have met a group of workers from Sudan and Chad, they camped in an old abandoned building just outside the city. I began to know these men and learned their stories; fragments of difficult lives marked by the longing for home and the precariousness of their way of living. At the end of our encounter, I asked to portray them and chose to do it with their blankets as a background as they are often the only shelter from the cold and from the light. The blanket is the only border between their inner world and the outside world.