Moving with the times in Mestre

A children’s shop in Mestre in the Venice area is listing prices for its pushchairs, prams and children’s wear in Bengali as well as Italian.

More babies are now born in the town (population 88,552) to immigrants from Bangladesh than to Italian, according to officials at Mestre town hall.

“It’s an obvious development,” shop-owner Andrea Cecchetto told Il Gazzettino, Mestre’s local newspaper. “You just have to look around to see how many Bangladeshi mothers there are walking around.”
“The world has changed and the cities have changed too, Mestre is no exception,” Cecchetto said.  “We have to move with the times.”

By 2022, the last year with available official figures, 150,692 Bangladeshis were living in Italy, which made them one of Italy’s largest immigrant populations.

The majority live in the Lazio, Lombardy and Veneto regions, although there are also large communities in Rome, Milan and Venice, according to figures from the Bangladeshi embassy in Rome.

The first Bangladeshis began to arrive in Italy at the beginning of the 1980s as industrialisation, a declining birthrate, and an ageing population made it necessary to look outside the country to supplement the workforce.

In 1987, 1990, 1996. 1998, 2002, 2009, 2012 and 2020 the Italian government offered general amnesties to illegal residents, including those in the Bangladeshi community, enabling them to obtain residence permits.