
X Alongside a sepia portrait of the revered Capuchin friar, Padre Pio, stand blurry digital prints of 13-year-old Cristina and 11-year-old Violetta Djeordsevic - two Roma sisters whose sudden deaths in the shallow waters of a public beach on Italy's Amalfi Coast last month encapsulated the threat of racism in modern Europe. It is a tragedy that has focused international attention on the ragged edge of Italy's most chaotic city. The teenagers' youth and beauty in the photographs, strangely, comes as a shock. Up until now, like most of the world, I had only seen their prostrate bodies, covered by short beach towels, with just their feet left exposed, on the scruffy beach at Torregaveta, a decrepit seaside suburb on the outer edge of the Bay of Naples. It was an image that shocked the world: two young Gypsy children lie dead for three hours on an Italian beach while, feet away, a carefree couple enjoy a leisurely picnic. The indifference, picked up by newspapers and TV stations across the world, was seen by the country's liberal elite to be the final straw. The most senior Catholic in Naples, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, was the quickest to point out the coarsening of human sentiment which the behaviour in Torregaveta represented: 'Cristina and Violetta,' he told the Italian media, 'had faced nothing but prejudice in life and indifference in death; an unforgivable truth.' |










































