While the rest of Italy hoped that the problem would melt into the length of the country, the holding centre on Lampedusa – just behind the harbour’s centre – was regularly overflowing and had to come up with answers. At times the situation became dangerous. There were fights and riots among the residents, often sparked by inter-ethnic rivalries. The migrant centre was meant to be a holding centre, but migrants began to wander around the town. When the authorities tried to keep people from going out through the main entrance, some of the migrants made a hole in the fence at the back and walked out that way. The centre is not a prison and the migrants were not prisoners. The question of precisely what they were and what their precise status was took on an improvised air. Increasingly, the migrants knew what their rights were and what the Italian authorities could and could not do with them.

It was natural that the locals, who had in the main been extraordinarily understanding and sympathetic to the new arrivals, occasionally became unnerved by the numbers. At a high flow the number of people arriving in a few days could easily outnumber the natives. And though the local shopkeepers sold their limited wares to the latest arrivals and sometimes gave them gifts, the authorities knew that they had to become better at processing people. In particular they had to move them off the island faster and get them onto boats up to Sicily and the mainland faster than they were managing. This was Lampedusa during the relative ‘trickle’ of the 2000s.

From 2011, after the events that became known as the ‘Arab Spring’, this trickle became a flood. In part this was because of the number of people fleeing changes of government and civil unrest. In part it was because of the crumbling of the shady agreements with the old dictators that had limited some of the activities of the people-traffickers. From 2011 onwards hundreds and sometimes thousands of people were arriving in Lampedusa day and night. They came on rickety wooden boats, old fishing vessels from North Africa purchased (or stolen) by the smugglers who would make their clients pay the ‘fare’, however unseaworthy the vessel. Soon the question of what to do with all these boats became an issue on Lampedusa. Unable to find any further use for these wrecks, the local authorities piled them up behind the harbour front and at other places on the island – great graveyards of wretched vessels. At intervals, when the numbers got too great, the boats were heaped up together and burned.