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knew that the city was on the map first, and second that it was not ‘the city of Fiat’”. Sergio Scamuzzi, professor of sociology at the University of Turin, says the Games “produced a new international image of the city”, and after the events “people all over the world. Hosting the Winter Olympics in 2006 was supposed to help rebrand Turin as a forward looking, post-industrial city, open to tourists, culture and competition. The Olympic arch in Turin, 10 years after the Games. But economic decline since the 1980s, and the closure of many Fiat factories in the city, left it with widespread unemployment and whole areas of abandoned factories, warehouses, and other industrial infrastructure. The largest city in Italy’s northwestern Piedmont province, Turin’s reputation as the post-war manufacturing centre of the country once earned it nicknames like “Italy’s Detroit” and “the car capital of Italy”. But the goal of occupying the Olympic Village, he says, was also to “make the local government understand that these people were not alone, that they were not abandoned, that they were united, that they have rights, and that they are retaking those rights, retaking them with the occupation”. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people on the street and so the primary need was to be able to give a home to these people – which is their right,” says Vasile. In 2013, when the Italian government’s Emergency North Africa programme abruptly ended, many living in these centres suddenly found themselves on the streets.

After arriving at the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa, thousands of people were routed through a network of temporary “centri di accoglienza” reception centres across the country. The majority of those living in the occupied Olympic Village were migrant workers from other African countries, working in Libya when the civil war broke out, says Vasile. He says it has “become a symbol for the protests of migrants and refugees in the city”. Today it is home to 1,100 people from 30 different African countries, according to Nicoló Vasile, 29, an Italian activist involved in the Comitato Solidarietá Rifugiati e Migranti, a group supporting the occupation. Within weeks, the occupation had grown to four buildings with more than 500 people.Īthletes walk in the Olympic Village in 2006. The “Ex Moi” occupation – named after the former wholesale fruit market that was once the area’s main landmark – began in March 2013 when approximately 100 refugees moved into one of the buildings in the Olympic athletes’ village. Migrants and refugees are living in abandoned farmhouses in the countryside and in other empty buildings in cities across Italy, according to Adamo, but this occupation in Turin is the largest he has ever seen. “If I didn’t have this right now I would be sleeping on the street, or at the train station,” says Adamo.

The primary need was to be able to give a home to these people – which is their right Nicoló Vasile He arrived at the occupation two days ago, and is staying temporarily with a friend who lives here while he looks for his next job. Originally from Mali, the 25-year-old says he doesn’t have a fixed place to stay and moves across the country on his bicycle, working on farms from Puglia to Piedmont, picking apples, pears and kiwis. “It’s a bit of a famous place,” Adamo says, standing outside the occupation.