Mainly employed as domestic workers and care providers since the 1980s, Filipino migrants have been, and still are, largely invisible in Italian public space. Since 1991, once a year, on the last Sunday of May, they transform the streets of Padua, city of Saint Anthony, into their own temporary ‘sacred space’ celebrating the finding of the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz). Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the paper analyses the preparation of the ritual and the embodied performance as a means to interpret the Filipino local and transnational territorialisation in the Italian context. The discussion underlines how the Italian setting affects the relationship between the sacred and the secular and between majority and minority religions in the urban texture. Urban space being the symbolic arena where identity and the process of boundary making are inscribed, we consider public space as a social process constituted by three levels: accessibility, temporary appropriation and visibility. Drawing on this immigrant religious ritual, we apply this perspective to look at the interactions between local society and newcomers and the blurring boundaries between religious and non-religious in the ambiguous Italian public space

Following the rhetoric of globalisation and hyper-mobility, the ideas of placelessness and detachment from place seem to be the essential features of contemporary cities. This conceals the human necessity to constantly create new senses of home and new home-making practices.Starting from ethnographic research in a multicultural condominium (called Hotel House) in Italy, the paper uses the urban experience of migrants to look at different home-making practices by analysing them as multidimensional (spatial, social and emotional) processes.Firstly, migrants living in Hotel House produce 'home' by imbuing domestic spaces with their own memory and meaning and creating public and collective spaces characterised by 'homely relations'. In both cases they produce material, emotional and symbolic resources. Secondly, the paper analyses the 'dark side of home-making', inasmuch as the social density of the homemaking practices in Hotel House's domestic and public spaces also favour strong forms of social control, particularly relevant for women and young people. Thirdly, the paper analyses how the sense of home sustains a collective intercultural mobilisations against Hotel House's institutional abandonment and stigmatisation that reveal the threshold-crossing capacity of 'home'. Home, in conclusion, is not a romanticised, fixed and bounded place to protect. It is a plural and conflictual field of action that can support social exclusion but can also open new interconnections and possibilities of peoples' empowerment.

City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, actionPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:The presence of immigration in the European urban landscape contributes to the re-questioning of taken-for-granted use and meanings of the urban texture. In Italian cities, we witness a contemporary struggle between different groups and individuals for the physical and symbolical production and appropriation of public space. This paper is based on qualitative research in the city of Padua (north-eastern Italy, Veneto region) on the territory around the railway station where migrants try to seek out symbolic and material resources while using specific spaces. However, in the process of manipulating urban spaces, migrants are accused of surpassing the 'upper threshold of correct visibility'. In other words, the level of visibility of their different bodies as well as the nonconventional uses of urban space challenge a 'spatial order' which is essentially taken for granted as the 'right way'. The paper highlights how local policies and the local mass media create an atmosphere of continuous 'moral panic' through the circulation of a stereotypical image of migrants. The paper concludes by calling for a radical shift in the policymaking process that has to be strongly informed by the physical, symbolical and emotional production of urban space. Difference today typifies the urban dimension of Italian cities and the development of contextual and coherent strategies to manage diverse urban societies is now of utmost importance.

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