TREVISO, ITALY — Giancarlo Gentilini likes to call himself the Sheriff of Veneto, this prosperous, fabled region of northern Italy.
The de facto mayor of Treviso is proud of the toy pistols and tin star someone sent him from Abilene, Texas, and of the cowboy hats and bigger-than-life portrait of himself that adorn his regal office. And he is proud of the hard line he takes on immigrants.
"When they see me, they run," he said, ticking off a list of what he claims as accomplishments: Getting rid of African street vendors and Romanian buskers. Closing the city's only mosque. Removing park benches to discourage immigrants from loitering. And banning red lanterns outside Chinese restaurants because they spoiled his hometown's Italian character.
"For the things I've said and done, I've been called the biggest racist, the biggest fascist, the biggest Nazi of all time," said Gentilini, 78, now deputy mayor after term limits prevented him from a third stint as mayor. "But now I see everyone following the gospel according to Gentilini."
It might be easy to dismiss Gentilini as one flamboyant extremist. But he articulates, however indelicately, an anti-immigrant sentiment that is spreading across parts of Italy, a country that for years exported its people as migrants and only recently began to welcome foreign-born workers. Once mostly homogenous, Italy is now struggling to adapt and cope with the change.
The backlash, fed in large part by fears of terrorism and other crimes, is especially intense here in the north, a region that has attracted the lion's share of immigrants because of abundant work in factories and farms. The region is also home to the right-wing Northern League, a small but influential political party that pushes a xenophobic agenda and was part of the national government until earlier this year.
But the backlash crosses political lines. In cities from Florence to Bologna, authorities want to arrest immigrants who swab car windshields at traffic stops, and they are debating ways to further toughen restrictions on new arrivals. In one nearby city, the center-left government erected a fence around an immigrant enclave, and elsewhere, campaigns have been launched to stop mosques from being built.
Roberto Calderoli, a senator and former government minister from the Veneto region, has proposed a regular "pig day" in which he will parade his pet pig on land where fast-growing Muslim immigrant communities are planning new mosques. The action desecrates the land, in the Muslim view, and the project would probably be nixed.
