Chinese stonemasons and restaurants in Lombardy/Veneto regions--underground textile workers also.
Indeed a trade treaty between Venice and the Mongol Empire was established in 1221, illustrating their ambitions to extend their trading capacities across Central Asia. Both luxury goods and daily necessities were exchanged in the markets of Venice, from salt and grain to porcelain and pearl. Similarly gems, mineral dyes, peacock feathers, spices and a profusion of textiles such as silks, cottons and brocades from Egypt, Asia Minor and the Far East all passed through the ports of Venice and were taken on by Venetian merchants to Europe, where they were becoming highly desirable and valuable items.https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/content/venice
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Already during the reconstruction period the textile factories of Como began to export their fabrics in the United States and, in particular, in 1960, the luxury silk export became one of the main markets of Italian products. In 1969, the United States, France and Germany absorbed 66% of the fabrics produced in Como for export.https://www.dare2wow.me/en/textile-history/italy/
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2-22-2020 A 77-year-old woman who was found dead at her house 50 km south of Milan on Thursday has tested positive for the coronavirus, a local councillor said on Saturday, after a 78-year-old man died of the infection near Padua overnight.
The man’s wife and daughter are among 12 people infected by the coronavirus in the Veneto region. Italy is the worst affected country in Europe, with the bulk of cases concentrated in Lombardy, the country’s financial and industrial heart.
Regional Welfare Councillor Giulio Gallera told reporters the center of the outbreak was Codogno, a small town southwest of Milan where Lombardy’s first infected patient was treated. That patient was a 38-year-old man who fell ill after meeting a friend who had visited China. His condition has stabilized, authorities said. “All those who have tested positive are people who on February 18-19 had contacts with the emergency room and the hospital of Codogno,” Gallera said, adding 259 people had been screened in the area in the past two days and 35 had tested positive. “A contagion rate of 13% is quite strong,” he said. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-italy/italys-coronavirus-outbreak-infects-51-people-kills-two-idUSKCN20G0CQ
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12-11-20 Scientists in Italy have identified a sample of the novel coronavirus collected from a young boy late last year that they say is genetically identical to the earliest strain isolated in the Chinese city of Wuhan almost a year ago. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3113444/coronavirus-italian-scientists-find-perfect-match-wuhan-strain
............................................................ Why was Lombardy hit harder than Italy's other regions? It is Italy’s richest region yet Covid-19 spread lethally through Lombardy “We had cases of atypical bronchial pneumonia that didn’t respond to treatment,” Dr. Mussi of Milan told the Guardian. “When the illness (case started on 1-20, hospitalized on 2-14-20) didn’t pass we started to wonder whether it might be connected to coronavirus.” (It did.) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/29/why-was-lombardy-hit-harder-covid-19-than-italys-other-regions
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3-26-2020 The Italian textile industry--mainly famous for its highly coveted luxury “Made in Italy” labels – is worth an estimated US$107.9 billion. It is propped up by what Italians have termed pronto moda, where cheap exploitative labour from Chinese migrant workers is used to sew up luxury fashion goods in the country to maximise profit…. up to 50,000 are believed to work in Prato alone, a city in Florence that has now been dubbed the “Chinatown” of Europe. … Migrant workers end up in Italian luxury fashion houses are forced to live, work, eat and pray in the same place. Tens of thousands of seamstresses and other workers cramped together in closed sweatshop conditions, without any access to medical care. If workers are forced to work in tight-knit closed quarters--sitting closer than the recommended 2 metres away from each other under current social distancing guidelines--just one infection can quickly balloon into a full-blown outbreak.
There are many Italian port cities, but it’s the northwest port of Genoa that is the country’s main and busiest cargo-handling point for container traffic in the region. Could this be the port where illegal workers from China entered? And from there could the workers have travelled to neighbouring Tuscany to reach Prato, where many of the factories are located?
What’s more is that most of these workers are in the country illegally, which means they don’t have any official registration documents or records of their employment and whereabouts, let alone any form of identification that would allow them to access Italy’s public healthcare system, known as Servizio Sanitario Nazionale. https://www.greenqueen.com.hk/exclusive-is-there-a-connection-between-luxury-fashion-brands-dirty-secret-and-italys-coronavirus-crisis/
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3-19-20
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2020. Italy even has direct flights from Wuhan.
Northern Italy has a huge Chinese immigrant population, many of whom traveled from Wuhan. Instead of testing and restricting these people, Italian authorities launched a ‘Hug a Chinese’ campaign in February. They are now paying the price.
"I’m not a virus. I’m human. Eradicate the prejudice.” This was the message of videos released in northern Italy in February this year, urging Italians to hug Chinese people to encourage them in the fight against the coronavirus. https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fql0s1/the_italy_wuhan_connection/
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More than ten per cent of Prato’s two hundred thousand legal residents are Chinese. According to Francesco Nannucci, the head of the police’s investigative unit in Prato, the city is also home to some ten thousand Chinese people who are there illegally. Prato is believed to have the second-largest Chinese population of any European city, after Paris https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-chinese-workers-who-assemble-designer-bags-in-tuscany
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1-3-2014 Shen Jianhe lost both her job and home when Italian police shut down her garment factory in the Tuscan city of Prato. By day the 38-year-old mother of four would sew trousers at one of the nearly 5,000 workshops run by Chinese immigrants in Prato, which largely turn out cheap clothing for fast-fashion companies in Italy and across Europe.
At night she slept in a plasterboard cubicle hidden behind a wooden wardrobe at the Shen Wu factory - until the police arrived one cold December morning. They sealed the doors and confiscated the 25 sewing machines under a crackdown on an industry that is booming but blighted by illegality and sweatshop conditions.
Amid rolls of fabric, food leftovers and dangling electric cables lay Shen's belongings: a pink baby coat, a blue children's stool, a laptop. She stuffed them into a van, ready to be transported away. "What choice do I have?" said Shen, tears filling her eyes.
Prato, the historical capital of Italy's textile business, has attracted the largest concentration of Chinese-run industry in Europe within less than 20 years.
As many as 50,000 Chinese live and work in the area, making clothes bearing the prized "Made in Italy" label which sets them apart from garments produced in China itself, even at the lower end of the fashion business.
In some ways the Chinese community of Prato has succeeded where Italian companies have failed. Italy's economy has barely grown over the past decade and is only just emerging from recession, partly due to the inability of many small manufacturers to keep up with global competition.
Yet Prato, which lies 25 km (16 miles) from the Renaissance jewel of Florence, is also a thriving hub of illegality committed by both Italians and Chinese, a byproduct of globalization gone wrong, many people in the city say. Up to two-thirds of the Chinese in Prato are illegal immigrants, according to local authorities. About 90 percent of the Chinese factories - virtually all of which are rented out to Chinese entrepreneurs by Italians who own the buildings -break the law in various ways, says Aldo Milone, the city councilor in charge of security.
This includes using fabric smuggled from China, evading taxes and grossly violating health and labor regulations. This month a fire, which prosecutors suspect was set off by an electric stove, killed seven workers as they slept in cardboard cubicles at a workshop. Italian officials acknowledge they haven't cracked down effectively on the mushrooming illicit behavior. https://ww.fashionnetwork.com/news/made-in-italy-by-chinese-workers,377237.html
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