FLORENCE. It sounds fairly benign in English but clandestino has Italian media roiled up. It’s the word of choice for some for those in the country illegally – the “illegals” of Italy’s immigration debate. But the word is so loaded with negative connotations that many in Italy’s media and civil society wonder if it’s not fanning the flames of xenophobia.

Not that there is any lack of that in Italy. A British media observer sent me a list of headlines that had appeared recently in Italian media. Headline writers have no problem putting the race and ethnicity of alleged perpetrators of crimes in their headlines, no matter whether the crime had anything to do with their race.

For example,

Argues with girlfriend – Sets fire to divan – Handcuffs for an Egyptian
Albanians ‘Lords’ of the drugs
Or

Nine immigrants in abandoned farmhouses – only one was illegal
Some Italian journalists are so worried they have come up with a Charter of Rome – a code of conduct on how to talk about refugees, asylum seekers and victims of trafficking. But it doesn’t go far enough said Lorenzo Guadagnucci, a journalist fighting against racism and promoting multicultural media. He said that not enough journalists subscribe to it yet and the Charter of Rome really focuses on asylum seekers rather than migrants in general.

And there is plenty of negative stereotyping of migrants around even when they are not seeking asylum. One example is that word clandestino. Italians wonder if it would not be better to use the word “without papers” instead. Do words like “clandestino” allow politicians seeking to whip up anti-immigrant frenzy to trade xenophobia for votes?

But in some ways it’s really anxiety about a changing society. In Florence, home of Italy’s high renaissance, of all that’s quintessential Italian, migrants are everywhere. Bangladeshis sell chestnuts in the piazza. African immigrants tout guidebooks to gaggles of Japanese tourists. Romanian immigrants take care of Italy’s elderly. Italians know this but are not always ready to admit that their country is changing. Instead some cities pass regulations about Doner Kebab shops in the hopes of hiding the face of migration. Lurid stories of Roma gypsies kidnapping babies turn from urban legends into accepted knowledge.

The story goes that when Pope Boniface VIII received the ambassadors of foreign states, they all turned out to be Florentine in origin. “You Florentines are the quintessence,” pronounced the Pope famously, a fact immortalized in a fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vechhio.

Now centuries after Boniface VIII, Italians wonder what is quintessentially Italian after all as migrants from Romania and Morocco and Bangladesh land on the streets of Italy. After all many of these immigrants don’t even eat Italy’s famous cured hams and prosciutto. An Arab journalist told me that after years in Italy the question he gets asked the most is still “But why don’t you eat pork?”