Camini, a Hosting Municipality: A Path of Collective Renewal
Participating and Inviting Organisations: Amitié Sans Frontières / Vriendschap Zonder Grenzen, Belgium House of Compassion, Brussels Comune di Camini, Italy Eurocoop Camini “Jungi Mundu”, Italy
Thursday, 25 June 2026 – from 12:00 to 13:30 House of Compassion, Saint-Jean-Baptiste-au-Béguinage Place du Béguinage 1 – 1000 Brussels – Belgium
Camini, a very small village in Calabria with around 300 inhabitants, threatened with disappearance for decades due to depopulation, has come back to life thanks to the reception of migrants and resettlement programmes. Over the past ten years, the municipality has built a remarkable experience in community development that has attracted attention far beyond Italy’s borders. As a true hosting municipality, Camini now stands as an exemplary model of social cohesion and intergenerational territorial renewal.
This village, reinvented through hospitality, has successfully met challenges once deemed insurmountable: reactivating the school system, achieving demographic growth in a region marked by stagnation or even drastic population decline, creating jobs, and ensuring the long-term settlement of new residents who choose to stay, work, develop new activities, start families, and actively participate in local life, which has become increasingly open to the world.
On the occasion of their institutional visit to Brussels, the mayor of Camini, architect Pino Alfarano, and Rosario Zurzolo, representative of the main socio‑economic actor in the area, will meet the community of the House of Compassion based in the Church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste-au-Béguinage to present the specific features of this experience. Built on synergy among local actors, this model demonstrates that a territorial revitalisation strategy based on hospitality can produce sustainable and replicable results in other contexts. Camini shows how solidarity can evolve into territorial development, transforming hospitality into a lever for economic, social, and demographic revitalisation.
Like nearly a thousand other Italian municipalities engaged for more than twenty‑five years in programmes welcoming migrants and refugees, Camini embodies a credible alternative to closed centres, whose high costs, inefficiency, violations of fundamental rights and environmental impact, as well as controversies related to the mental health of detained persons, are well documented. In contrast to these mechanisms — including those recently established across the Adriatic Sea in Shëngjin and Gjadër in Albania at the initiative of the Giorgia Meloni government — this small Calabrian municipality has become one of the most accomplished examples of diffuse reception in Italy, contributing to the revitalisation of a territory marked by demographic decline and rural exodus.
This meeting carries particular significance as we approach the commemorations of the so‑called “men for coal” agreement, which, starting in June 1946, led tens of thousands of Italians to migrate to Belgium in exchange for coal for their country of origin — a country to which many would never return. This episode remains one of the most emblematic and dramatic chapters in Italian migration history, still too little known in Italy today. Today, we have the opportunity to tell more constructive stories: not only those of return to southern European regions, but also those of territories capable of attracting new residents from around the world rather than seeing them leave.
In Camini, young volunteers, students from around the world, professionals, and retirees choose every day to live part or all of their lives in the village, putting their skills at the service of the community. This experience demonstrates a true circularity of life paths and the possibility of choosing places that are still little known but profoundly alive, where meaningful personal and collective projects can be built.
Just a few dozen kilometres away, on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, the detention centres built in Albania embody a radically different vision, based on pushbacks and the dismantling of the right to asylum. Camini, on the contrary, tells another story: one of social cohesion, hospitality, and shared citizenship. This experience shows that these values can take shape — and even find their strongest expression — in small municipalities facing the dramatic effects of depopulation and isolation, and that fully understand the scale of the work required, already well underway, to prevent this downward spiral from recurring.
Beyond its specific history, Camini illustrates how a hosting municipality can become a living laboratory of social innovation, citizen participation, and local development. Its experience shows that it is possible to combine hospitality, dignity, social cohesion, and territorial future, while offering a concrete response to the challenges of depopulation affecting many regions of Europe.
We look forward to welcoming you on Thursday, 25 June 2026, from 12:00 to 13:30, to discover the experience of Camini in the presence of Mayor Pino Alfarano and Rosario Zurzolo of the Jungi Mundu cooperative, with introductory remarks by Anna Lodeserto, Geneviève Frère, and Lore Janssens.
Greetings to MEPs:
● Georgia Ilaria Iben Tramacere (invited) ● Tridico (invited) ● Princi (invited) ● Benedetta Scuderi (invited) ● Marc Botenga (invited) ● Saskia Bricmont (invited)
The conversation will take place in French, Dutch, Italian, and English, in a convivial atmosphere with light refreshments.
For any further information or to confirm your attendance, please write to: <coord@houseofcompassion.be>
There are also some great press articles : FR « Camini, l’autre village calabrais repeuplé par les migrants » Courrier international https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/italie-camini-l-autre-village-calabrais-repeuple-par-les-migrants_241268 NL « In Camini zijn vluchtelingen geen probleem, maar een oplossing » De Volkskrant https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2021/in-camini-zijn-vluchtelingen-geen-probleem-maar-een-oplossing~v459437/
