ABSTRACT
This article offers a reading of the city of Naples in Southern Italy as a European borderland, a space where the North/South configuration wavers and mutates in the wake of immigration flows. Historically a place of contrasts, symbol of the Southern Question, Naples seems to be adding to its age-long ills a problematic racial question. The article reports and analyzes some interviews with migrant women living in the city and its surroundings. The life stories of Sri Lankan, Nigerian, and Ukrainian women provide a vivid picture of how they are building their lives in an inhospitable environment, in search of a place of their own. Their experiences testify to forms of social and cultural practices among the local population which are blatantly segregationist. It is an alarming portrayal of the forms of racism against and exclusion of women immigrants in Naples which weakens the prospect of the peaceful construction of a multicultural society in the southern Italian context.
