Racism's Rising Tide; Instances of anti-Semitism receive global attention. But the new antipathy toward foreigners of color, especially in Italy, is a far more worrisome trend.

Byline: Christopher Dickey (With Eric Pape in Paris and Alessandra Fava in Genoa)

Foreigners are not strangers to the old spice shop on Genoa's Via del Campo. The narrow little street near the port was first built up during the Crusades. In legend and song, it's glorified as a place where people on the edges of society find their way, and for several decades many of those people have been North African. But when a couple of middle-aged men walked into the shop the other day and asked for some dried fruits in Arabic instead of Italian, the old woman behind the counter blew up. "If they talk their language, then we talk our language!" she shouted--in a Genoese dialect which even many Italians wouldn't understand.

Such outbursts aren't unique to exasperated shopkeepers. Resentment of immigrants, along with fear of Muslim terrorists, is fueling intolerance almost everywhere in Europe. Some incidents, like recent desecrations of Muslim and Jewish graves in France, draw wide attention. But Italy is fast acquiring a reputation for pervasive racism that's at once more passive and more passionate than elsewhere.

Earlier this month the editor of the Paris daily Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, wrote an open letter to the Rome daily La Repubblica warning against "the idiotic attitude that's ruining our beloved Italy." Colombani, who is French, was on a family trip to Venice when his 20-year-old adopted son, of Indian origin, was singled out at the airport to be searched and questioned. This had happened to him many times before in Italy, and the authorities in Venice didn't seem to think twice about the humiliation--unlike German or British police, he pointedly noted. "Our Europe cannot be one of racism. Never."

But other, more strident voices in Italy are pushing in exactly that direction. Oriana Fallaci, now 74, has developed a niche all her own as a best-selling voice of fear and fury. Since her book-length essay "The Rage and the Pride" was published in the wake of September 11, she's been kindling the flames of a new inquisition against Muslims in Europe. A more recent diatribe, "The Strength of Reason," has sold 800,000 copies--ample evidence that Italians still have a ready appetite for her anger. Europe is no longer Europe, Fallaci argues, it is "Eurabia." As far as she's concerned, attempts by European governments to legislate tolerant, multicultural societies have been disastrous. "They don't like me to say that Troy is burning, that Europe has become a province, even a colony of Islam and Italy is an outpost of that province, a bastion of that colony," she writes.

Ironically, Italy used to be considered one of Europe's least prejudiced societies, at least in racial terms. But that was partly because Italians tend to be as suspicious of one another as they are of foreigners. "In Italy, outsiders can be from not very far away," says Tony Judt of New York University's Remarque Institute. In Genoa, for instance, a line could be drawn between those who speak the local dialect, and those who don't. In Torino or Milan or Venice, it's common to hear Sicilians and Neapolitans talked about, privately, as "Arabs" and "Africans." Umberto Bossi's Lega Nord, or Northern League, a fractious party in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government, built its base on just that sort of rabid regionalism--and now plays politics with the country's growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

For Italy's "Africans," role models for successful integration are very few. There are no black or Arab faces in Parliament. They're rare on Italy's national football team. Few are in executive suites, and most jobs available to them are menial or marginal. That's the case with most immigrants of color. Centuries ago Venice might have had a moor commanding its fleets, but the most common African faces there now are selling knockoff designer handbags in the streets--and even that sort of presence is too much for some Italians.