Enjoying an espresso on an early summer afternoon in elegant Bologna, I listen to a young Neapolitan woman who has just finished her dissertation on Moroccan and Somalian women in Italy, and who has graciously agreed to meet with me. As she tells me of these women's experiences and the hostility they encounter despite their hard work and often ingenious efforts to “integrate,” she muses, “Poverty is Italy's last taboo.” She adds that, having only in the last few generations escaped the grinding poverty that induced their own emigration, Italians are repulsed by the sight of poverty. Probably that is why its “aesthetics” are so disturbing. It is not just that poverty is an eyesore that causes us to avert our gaze or spatially remove ourselves in gated enclaves. The real fear that fuels our passions is that it might be contagious.

We saw in the last chapter that the stigma of poverty is a core component of immigrants' racialization. But, poverty and economic marginality are more than unseemly markers of difference that trigger fear and disgust; they are the material axis on which immigrants' exclusion turns. Basic necessities such as housing and health care are often inaccessible to immigrants not just because of administrative ill-will and deliberate discrimination (although, as we saw in Chapter 5, that is not inconsequential), but because of their unaffordability and – in the case of health care – the absence of a fixed address or social security card.