The Italian town that banned cricket

Hard-Right mayor’s edict in shipbuilding community with one-third immigrant population is symbolic of wider culture clash

When a group of young Bangladeshis started playing cricket in a park in the Italian town of Monfalcone, the reaction from local authorities was uncompromising.
They were ordered to pack up their bats and balls and leave the park that sits beneath the town’s medieval stone fortress. Then they were issued with heavy fines.
“We don’t have any opportunity to play cricket. There are 9,000 of us Bangladeshis in Monfalcone, and there is no pitch,” said Sakib Miah, 25, a keen cricketer. “If we go and play, the police arrive and we get a 100 euro fine.”
Mr Miah is one of thousands of Bangladeshis and other south Asians who live in Monfalcone, drawn to the town over the last 20 years by the promise of work in the nearby Fincantieri shipyards, which are among the largest in Europe.
Of the town’s population of 31,000, a third are migrants – one of the highest proportions of any town or city in Italy.
Not everyone in Monfalcone has welcomed the newcomers, or their fondness for cricket.
Anna Maria Cisint, the mayor of the town in the north-eastern region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, has effectively banned cricket from being played. She is a member of the hard-Right League party which is part of Giorgia Meloni’s governing coalition.
She insists that cricket is a menace to public safety, saying that errant balls have smashed the windows of houses and damaged parked cars. The ban applies to any sport that could be dangerous, she says, such as baseball.
While the resounding thwack of leather on willow conjures up images of immaculate village greens and long lazy afternoons, at least in British minds, in this corner of Italy close to the border with Slovenia, cricket has become a battleground.
“Cricket balls have caused serious damage to homes and cars – they travel at 160 kph. They’re heavy and they’re very dangerous – if they hit you in the head, they could kill someone,” said the mayor, whose father and grandfather worked in the shipyards.
But the Bangladeshi community views the prohibition as an unnecessary act of spite.
They have been asking for years for the council to provide them with a cricket pitch where they can play in peace.
The clash of cultures is in many ways a microcosm of the rapid changes that Italy is undergoing as it evolves from a largely white society into a more multicultural country of first, second and even third generation immigrants.
“First of all, we don’t have any space. Also, we don’t have the economic resources,” said the mayor in her office in the town hall, which overlooks Monfalcone’s elegant main piazza.
The town’s cricket enthusiasts don’t buy that argument.
“That’s not true, there is plenty of space,” said Tanim Hossain, 27, who like many of the local cricketers works at the Fincantieri shipyards.
“We’ve been asking for years and years. We can’t take part in tournaments because we can’t train.
“We just want to play and have fun after our shifts. We use a soft ball not a traditional, hard ball. We have never broken windows or damaged cars.”
The immigrants say that without them, work at the shipyards would grind to a halt. They arrive in their thousands each day, riding beaten-up old bicycles which they park in racks outside the entrance to the docks.
It is not just cricket that the mayor has a problem with. She takes issue with many other aspects of the immigrants’ presence in Monfalcone, saying their way of life is incompatible with Italian society.
“They don’t want to integrate. The women walk around fully veiled, with only their eyes visible. It is unacceptable that a little girl of six goes to school with her face totally covered,” said Ms Cisint, who has been mayor since 2016 and was recently elected an MEP representing the League.
“We have had cases of young women being beaten by their parents and forced into arranged marriages.”
The mayor will be taking her warning about the dangers of “Islamification” and the migrant “invasion” to Brussels, she says.
She is currently engaged in a battle to shut down the town’s two Islamic cultural centres, saying they lack planning permission because one was set up in an old pizzeria and the other in a former fishmonger’s shop.
She says that past media coverage has cast her as “a monster”, as a result of which she has received death threats from Islamists. For the last 10 months, she has lived under police protection.
“Having foreigners as a third of our population is maybe the highest percentage of any town in Italy. It’s not easy to live like this. This is not Milan or London, it’s a small town,” she said.
All these criticisms are vigorously contested by Sani Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi community leader and an opposition councillor representing the centre-Left Democratic Party.
“You can’t generalise. If there is one person who is not integrated, you cannot say that everyone is like that,” he said.
“There are 9,000 Bangladeshis in this town. If a woman wants to wear a hijab, or wants to walk around nude for that matter, that is her right. Bangladeshis pay taxes, they contribute to the economic growth of this country.”
Mr Bhuiyan, 34, who runs a financial and migration consultancy, came to Italy in 2006 at the age of 16 after his father found a job in the shipyards.
“I came here, I learned Italian, I can speak six languages, I have been elected a city councillor…how can I integrate more than this?” he asks.
Mr Bhuiyan also says It is “ridiculous” to deny the south Asian community a cricket pitch, adding: “You bring people to work here, to build nice cruise ships in the shipyards, but when it’s time to recognise their rights, you deny them.
“In Monfalcone we have skating rinks, football pitches, basketball and volleyball courts – everything except a cricket pitch.
“They’re acting like the pharaohs who built the pyramids, treating us like slaves. It’s discrimination against non-Europeans. They don’t accept diversity. In a time of globalisation, this is ridiculous.”
Nicola Pieri, the centre-Left mayor of the neighbouring town of Turriaco, accuses the mayor of Monfalcone of denying immigrants a cricket pitch out of “spite”.
“Monfalcone is big – they could easily find the space and provide a cricket pitch for them. It’s a lack of respect, it’s out of spite,” he said.
“These young guys just want to play cricket. Sport is one of the ways in which you can help integration. Bangladeshi kids play football, maybe the opposite can be encouraged – that Italian kids play cricket.”
The culture clash in Monfalcone is a distillation of many of the issues that Italy, as an increasingly multicultural society, is having to confront.
That includes a rancorous national debate about changing the law to make it easier for the children of migrants to become Italian citizens. Currently, they cannot even apply for citizenship until they reach the age of 18, leaving an entire generation in limbo and putting Italy at odds with most other European countries.
“The country is changing. The birth rate among Italians is constantly declining. We need to expand our vision and think about what Italy will be like in 10 or 20 years’ time. It will be a much more multi-ethnic country,” said Mr Pieri.
For some locals, it is not cricket per se that they object to, but the dramatic demographic and social changes that have occurred to the town since the Bangladeshis and other immigrants started arriving two decades ago.
“When you go into the piazza, you don’t recognise anyone you know anymore. The Bangladeshis keep to themselves. The mothers speak very little Italian. Their kids have to translate for them. Some want to integrate but they are rare cases,” said Emanuela De Matteis, the owner of a restaurant in the town centre.
Sakib Miah, the 25-year-old who is desperate to play cricket, says he and his friends are now thinking of trying to raise enough money to buy a plot of land to make a pitch.
If each of them chips in 20 euros a month, they might have enough funds within five years, he calculates. He looks forward to the day that he can play a few overs after a long week of working shifts in the shipyards.
“It would be not just for us, but for our kids, and for Italian kids too, if they would like to learn to play,” he said.
“It’s cricket. It’s just a game. We never wanted it to become so political.”