Neither fame nor defeat has diminished Guisi Nicolini’s compassion for migrants

As Mayor of Lampedusa, Guisi Nicolini was celebrated as a champion for refugees. Then came her defeat at the hands of voters. Now, still living on the Island, she continues to call for solidarity with those arriving on small boats from Africa

By The Immigrant Times

Lampedusa harbour and the migrant reception centre. The island lies 113 kilometres from Tunisia, closer to Africa than to mainland Italy, and has been Europe's primary Mediterranean entry point for migrants since the early 2000s. Former Mayor Giusi Nicolini, still a resident, has never stopped calling for solidarity with those who arrive.

March 2026: In July 2013, Pope Francis visited the Italian island of Lampedusa to mourn. It was his first official trip outside Rome since his election four months earlier. Instead of a European capital, he chose a remote island of 6,000 people closer to Tunisia than to the Italian mainland. He cast a wreath into the sea in memory of the migrants who had drowned trying to reach Europe, and called on the world to repent what he described as the 'globalisation of indifference’. He praised the people of Lampedusa as an example of humanity to the world.

It was a moment that crystallised something many islanders genuinely felt. For years, Lampedusans had been pulling people from the water, giving them dry clothes, calling the coastguard, attending funerals for the nameless dead. Their mayor, a fierce environmentalist named Giusi Nicolini, had already written an open letter to the European Union, asking, with controlled fury, how large the island's cemetery would need to grow before anyone in Brussels felt moved to act.

The Mayor’s letter, the papal visit, and the October 2013 shipwreck that killed more than 360 people, the worst single disaster in the Mediterranean in modern times, made the world pay attention to the plight of Lampedusa, while Guisy Nicolini became a hero to those who called for a humane treatment of refugees.

Guisi Nicolini

Nicolini was born on Lampedusa in 1961. She came up through the environmental movement, Legambiente, and spent years fighting illegal construction and protecting sea turtle nesting grounds. When she was elected mayor in May 2012, migration was already a serious problem, but managed, in her own words, on an emergency basis. The infrastructure was minimal: when boats arrived at night, firefighters had to bring portable generators because there were no lights at the port. There were no toilets.

She installed lights. She installed toilets. She started keeping count of the dead.

In November 2012, six months into her first term, she wrote to Europe's leaders. Eleven bodies had been recovered from the sea that day, eight women, three children. The EU had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “Just imagine,” she wrote, “if eleven Western Europeans had drowned while on an Adriatic cruise. There would have been endless news programmes, followed by elaborate funerals and subsequent enquiries.” She could not hide her anger.

Guisi Nicolini first won international attention when in 2014 the London-based City Mayors Foundation shortlisted her for the World Mayor Prize.

Testimonials arrived from across Europe. From Milan, one nominator wrote that the Lampedusa Mayor had handled an 'immense humanitarian catastrophe' with generosity, and that she and the people of her island were 'moving in their commitment.' A reader in Jena, Germany, writing despite his own city's mayor being on the shortlist, chose Nicolini, saying electing her 'could be an eye-opener and might hopefully have an impact on finding solutions to prevent these human disasters.' From Beijing, another wrote simply that 'few people like her could cope with such a disastrous humanitarian catastrophe.' A Milan professor who had known her for thirteen years spoke of her 'passion, courage and love for her island.'

Over the following years, the recognition accumulated. Nicolini won the Olaf Palme Prize, the UNESCO Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi took her to Washington as part of a delegation representing Italian excellence. She met President Obama. Gianfranco Rosi filmed her for his documentary Fuocoammare, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2016.

She spoke with clear moral authority and was effective. She turned statistics into human beings. She shamed governments. And she was, by all accounts, genuinely motivated by what she witnessed every day at the port.

The Mayor’s fame did not benefit the Island

While Nicolini's international profile grew, conditions on the island told a more complicated story. The official EU reception facility, known as the Contrada Imbriacola centre, which opened in 2015, was from the start an institution not fit for purpose. Designed for stays of no more than 48 hours with a capacity of around 400 people, it provided no activities and minimal services, yet migrants were routinely held for far longer. Italy's Senate human rights committee criticised it for, in effect, denying some migrants the right to claim asylum properly.

Academic researchers who spent time on the island noted that Nicolini's powerful advocacy, her projection of Lampedusa as a uniquely compassionate community, had the unintended effect of suppressing outside scrutiny of what migrants actually experienced inside the camp. Her narrative was not dishonest, but it was partial. The island's solidarity was real; so were the deficiencies of the system it was being asked to sustain.

And there were other issues closer to home. When Lampedusans voted in June 2017, migration was not the only thing on their minds. The island had seen problems with the water supply, waste management contracts that residents considered improper, unsanctioned construction, and what some described as a culture of favouritism. These did not make international headlines, but they mattered to people who lived there.

Nicolini became an international icon but lost touch with the people

The mayoral election result came in on the night of 11 June 2017. Nicolini, the incumbent mayor, came third. Her predecessor as mayor, Salvatore 'Totò' Martello, a hotelier, had beaten her comprehensively, with over 1,500 votes to her 908. International media reacted with something close to bewilderment. 'Lampedusa fires Mayor Nicolini, symbol of hospitality and winner of UNESCO peace prize,' ran one headline. 'Lampedusa rebukes the symbolic mayor of migrants,' said another.

Someone spray-painted on a wall: 'Thank you for removing the Lampedusian cancer.' The message was quickly erased by other residents and provoked widespread condemnation. It was seized on internationally as evidence that the island had turned against migrants. Local researchers argued this reading was far too simple.

The Lampedusian activist collective Askavusa published a careful analysis arguing that the election result had nothing to do with migration, that Nicolini had lost because of how she had administered the island, not because of her solidarity with refugees. The distinction matters. The vote was not a repudiation of welcome; it was a demand for basic municipal competence from a community that felt taken for granted.

Nicolini, joining the national secretariat of the centre-left Democratic Party (Partito Democratico, PD) after her defeat, called Martello's early statements about the island being 'at breaking point' psychological terrorism. The local parish priest, Don Carmelo La Magra, supported her reading: 'I see an extremely liveable island, calm and full of tourists. I see no disorder at all.'

Lampedusa’s mayors and their approaches to refugees

Giusi Nicolini

Mayor from 2012 to 2017

Approach to refugees:

Led with a humanitarian principle. Built Lampedusa's international reputation for solidarity. Criticised in retrospect for allowing the camp's poor conditions to escape scrutiny, while her public advocacy generated global goodwill.

Salvatore Martello

Mayor from 2017 to 2023

Approach to refugees:

Began with combative rhetoric, calling for the camp to be closed and accusing migrants of harassment. Evolved into a more measured voice, calling for structural EU solutions, and campaigned for 3 October, the day of the 2013 shipwreck, to become a European Day of Remembrance.

Filippo Mannino

Mayor from 2023 to date

Approach to refugees:

Self-described pragmatist. Oversaw handover of camp management to the Italian Red Cross, bringing greater efficiency but tighter confinement. Pledged inclusion policies at the 2023 Global Refugee Forum while simultaneously declaring a state of emergency during the September 2023 surge. Consistent in demanding European burden-sharing.

What is striking across all three administrations is a common thread of frustration directed not at migrants themselves, but at Rome and Brussels. Each mayor has, in his or her own way, argued that a small island of 6,000 people has been left to manage a continental failure alone. The language has shifted; the underlying complaint has not.

Under Mannino, the system has become notably more efficient. The Italian Red Cross, which took over management of the Contrada Imbriacola camp in June 2023, introduced better-organised transfers and more structured procedures. A Red Cross coordinator said in 2025 that local residents were now 'less affected by the migrant arrivals' because the process had become smoother.

Giusi Nicolini, after her years in the public eye

After her 2017 election defeat, Nicolini did not leave Lampedusa. She did not retreat into bitterness or silence. She stayed on the island and kept watching.

She left the Democratic Party and began what she described as politics from below, without a party. She continued to give interviews, attend conferences and write. In 2023, she co-authored a book with journalist Marta Bellingreri, Lampedusa: Conversazioni su isole, politica, migranti (Conversations on islands, politics and migrants), which offered a reflection on what the island had lived through and what it still meant.

She also kept documenting what the cameras could no longer easily see. When the Covid pandemic began in 2020, the Italian government used the health emergency to justify confining migrants entirely within the camp. A fence went up. Military guard towers appeared. Armed police blocked the entrance. Migrants who had previously moved through the town, visiting aid organisations, sitting in cafés, disappeared behind wire fences.

In July 2022, Nicolini posted photographs and a video on social media showing conditions inside the camp: 1,878 people crammed into a facility designed for around 350, sleeping on old foam mattresses in the open air, surrounded by mountains of rubbish, with fewer than 200 beds available. Four pregnant women and people in need of medical care were forced to sleep and eat on the ground amid the refuse. 'These images could be from Libya,' she wrote. 'But this is Italy.' The post triggered front-page coverage in La Stampa and prompted government pledges to act.

The pledges did not resolve the underlying problem. In September 2023, some 7,000 people arrived in a single 48-hour period, more than the island's entire population. Churches opened their doors, residents went to the port to help, and Mayor Mannino declared a state of emergency.

A chance interview in a street café

In October 2025, Leslie Carretero, a journalist, visited Lampedusa as part of a series marking the tenth anniversary of the 2015 migration crisis. She found Giusi Nicolini sitting outside the island's main café, a glass of water in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Nicolini spoke about the early days, the generators, the absence of toilets, the bodies brought in from the sea. “I hadn't even taken my oath yet when twelve migrant bodies washed ashore in 2012,” she told Carretero. “I didn't know what to do, since nothing was organised.” She reflected on how the island had changed since then: the camp was now efficiently run, migrants were swiftly transferred, and the streets of Lampedusa were, as Carretero observed, exclusively populated by islanders and tourists.

“The formerly open camp has become a closed one,” Nicolini said. She described how migrants had once come freely into town to visit aid organisations, and how that contact, imperfect, fragmentary, but human, had ceased entirely since 2020. The people arriving on the island, in their tens of thousands each year, had been made invisible to those living there.

A significant second Papal visit

During the research for this article, the Vatican announced a second Papal visit to Lampedusa. The American-born Pope Leo XIV will visit Lampedusa on 4 July 2026, thus choosing the island over celebrations in the United States marking the 250th anniversary of American independence. The Vatican has said he will offer comfort to those at the reception centre and to those who assist them.

Thirteen years after Francis made Lampedusa the destination of his first papal journey, his successor has made the same choice. The island has not ceased to be a place that demands a response from those with a conscience and a platform. What has changed is almost everything around it: the scale of arrivals, the nature of the camp, the political climate in Italy and Europe, and the degree to which the suffering inside the camp has been made invisible to the world outside.

Methodology

Primary sources: Pope Francis, Homily at Lampedusa, 8 July 2013; Giusi Nicolini, Open Letter to the European Union, November 2012; Giusi Nicolini and Marta Bellingreri, Lampedusa: Conversazioni su isole, politica, migrant; World Mayor Prize 2014; Mayor Filippo Mannino, address to the Global Refugee Forum, December 2023;

Interviews and reported pieces: Leslie Carretero, 'Lampedusa, from humanity to making migrants invisible' InfoMigrants; Mixed Migration Centre, interview with Giuseppina Nicolini: 'Beyond Emergency' April 2021; UNESCO, interview with Giuseppina Nicolini: 'It's natural for an island to be welcoming'; Mayor Salvatore Martello, interview with the European Committee of the Regions, May 2021; Malcolm Brabant, 'Tensions rise in Lampedusa', PBS NewsHour, September 2021

News coverage: InfoMigrants, 'Italy: More than 120,000 migrants passed through Lampedusa since 2023; The New Humanitarian, 'Italy's Lampedusa: Back on the migration front line, August 2020; CNN, '7,000 people arrive on Italian island of 6,000 as migrant crisis overwhelms Lampedusa' September 2023; EUObserver, 'Lampedusa: The invisible migrant crisis at Europe's gate', January 2026; Vatican News, 'Pope Leo XIV to visit Lampedusa on 4 July 2026', February 2026; Reuters / AP, 'Pope Leo to spend US July 4 holiday on Italy's Lampedusa'.

Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Pope Leo XIV on migration || The 2026 Solidarity Prize || African migrants || Two Popes on refugees || The Sudan refugee crisis ||

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