ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on role played by migrant care work within the Italian long-term care (LTC) system. Italy is a country where the informal sector, and in particular the family, has traditionally represented the bulk of care provision, with public policies and interventions tending to perpetuate and take for granted this constellation. The analysis examines the increasingly important pillar of the Italian LTC system represented by care workers who are directly employed by Italian households, usually called in Italian assistenti familiari or – in a partly pejorative informal term – badanti. The impact of demographic trends on the Italian LTC system is exacerbated by a traditional lack in the coverage of formal LTC services, and more recently by the deepest economic recession since the Second World War. Families can take the chance to open up to new care and living solutions and create human capital, or they can isolate and shut down any positive possibility in the caregiving triad.
