ROME — Maria Santonastaso has lived most of her six decades in Esquilino, a popular, busy neighborhood of wide streets and 150-year-old buildings atop one of ancient Rome's seven hills.
For generations, Romans came from all over the city to shop for bargains at Esquilino's vegetable and fruit market, stopping on the way at its mom-and-pop coffee bars and homey trattorias.
But today the merchants are more likely to be named Ling Chong than Luciano.
Santonastaso and her Italian neighbors have watched in dismay as, first, their dry cleaners, then their favorite bakery and, more recently, the little place where they bought their mozzarella have disappeared.
The Piazza Vittorio at the heart of Esquilino is flanked by more signs in Chinese characters than Latin letters. A coffee bar on the piazza is named Caffe Del Portico Xu Ping. Most of Rome's 250 Chinese restaurants (10 times the number of 15 years ago) are within a few blocks.
Esquilino has become home to Rome's fast-growing Chinatown, and many Italians are feeling displaced.
"We have lost our neighborhood," said Santonastaso, a translator for a legal firm. "We are being thrown out. I go outside and I don't see Italians anymore."
Daniele Wong also has lived most of his life in Italy. A son of immigrants, he worked for many years in restaurants but now is launching a real estate business specializing in selling homes to Chinese.
"Romans don't know foreigners and immigrants very well," he said. "They say we are stealing Italian jobs, and they always assume we are doing illegal things. You hear negative comments all the time."
The tensions between Chinese and Italians in Esquilino are typical of any immigrant community and its new home, and cities throughout Europe are struggling with questions over how to accommodate the foreign-born. But Romans are particularly tradition bound, and the growth of "La Chinatown" is proving traumatic.
Despite its ancient history as the seat of an empire that spanned much of the globe, Rome has only recently faced the phenomenon of modern immigration. Until the 1980s, Italy was a net exporter of labor.
Only then was the trend reversed, with the arrival of tens of thousands of East European, African and Asian immigrants, branded, officially, extracomunitari -- an exclusionist term meaning outside the European community.
