THE 2026 IMMIGRANT TIMES SOLIDARITY PRIZE

Candidate for the 2026 Prize:

Riace, Calabria, Italy

The Immigrant Times Solidarity Prize will be awarded to a town or city, large or small, where residents have demonstrated that communities thrive when people support one another, whether their neighbours are newly arrived immigrants, families with roots in other parts of the world, or locals whose ties to the area date back generations.

The Riace Model is innovative and internationally praised as a beneficial initiative for communities in Italy and beyond, which face severe decline due to depopulation. Towns and villages adopting the model place migrants in abandoned homes, thereby revitalising the communities. However, the Riace Model has been and continues to be opposed by right-wing, anti-immigrant parties in Italy and across Europe. (Photo: Riace Mayor Domenico Lucano)

The Riace Model (Modello Riace)

May 2026: Riace, a hilltop village, is situated above the Ionian coast of Calabria, in one of the poorest and most depopulated areas of southern Italy. By the early 1990s, the village had been losing residents for decades. From a population of 2,331 in 1951, it had decreased to fewer than 1,700 by 1980, with its historic upper town, the Borgo Superiore, becoming increasingly empty of working-age adults and young families, its school at risk of closure, and its shops and workshops closed. This was not an unusual story in rural Calabria, where the combination of limited employment, the attraction of northern cities, and the long shadow of organised crime had emptied out many communities.

In the summer of 1998, a vessel carrying 218 Kurdish refugees fleeing persecution ran aground on the Calabrian coast near Riace. The people of the village did not turn them away. Local residents, led by Domenico Lucano, then a schoolteacher and community activist, helped the newcomers find shelter in the empty houses that lined the old town's alleyways. That act of spontaneous solidarity became the seed of something larger.

In 1999, Lucano and other residents of Riace founded the Città Futura (Future City) (1) organisation, which formalised the welcome the community had offered and began developing a structured approach to integration. Abandoned houses were identified, restored, and made habitable for refugee families. Defunct workshops were reopened. Traditional Calabrian crafts, including weaving, ceramics, glasswork, preserves, and bread-making, were revived, with migrants and local residents working together. A cooperative, Il Paese e il Cielo (The Village and the Sky), was established to manage the workshops and generate income for participants.

In 2001, Riace joined Italy's national asylum programme, the Piano Nazionale Asilo (PNA), which later became the SPRAR (Sistema di Protezione per Richiedenti Asilo e Rifugiati), providing the initiative with access to national and European public funds and integrating it into Italy's formal protection system. What had started as a grassroots act of hospitality had now acquired an institutional framework.

When Domenico Lucano was elected mayor in 2004, the model entered a new phase. Municipal resources and administrative capacity were focused on expanding the integration project. Three practical innovations came to define the Riace approach. A 'moneta locale', a local currency, was introduced to address persistent delays in state disbursements, enabling refugees to make purchases within the community while awaiting reimbursements. 'Borse lavoro' (employment grants) provided participants with monthly stipends of around €600, regardless of workshop profits, allowing refugees to develop skills and contribute to the community without becoming dependent. Additional social funds, adjusted for family size, offered a basic level of financial dignity. The overarching principle remained the same: that integration was about participation, not merely accommodation.

The results, in demographic and economic terms, were remarkable. Riace's population, which had been 1,610 in 2001, reached a peak of 2,345 in 2016. The local school, which was facing closure, reopened and was filled with children. Artisan shops attracted visitors; an eco-tourism initiative generated income for the village. At its peak, the programme settled around 450 refugees among Riace's 1,800 inhabitants, with participants from over twenty countries (including Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Eritrea, Syria, Iran, and many others) living and working in the village. Throughout the programme's duration, an estimated 6,000 migrants passed through Riace and received support from it.

The Riace model caught the attention of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which officially recognised it as an example of best practice. It was examined by researchers from universities across Europe and beyond, and it directly inspired similar programmes in other depopulated Italian villages, including Camini and Acquaformosa. It became, in the words of one academic study, ‘a political laboratory’ for towns across Italy grappling simultaneously with demographic decline and the arrival of asylum seekers.

The model's key insight—that depopulation of rural areas and refugee displacement are interconnected issues that can be tackled together—was both straightforward and revolutionary. An empty house allocated to a refugee family is no longer vacant. A workshop that employs both local residents and migrants creates income for everyone involved. A school that might otherwise shut down can stay open if enough children attend. Riace showed, through practical experience and over many years, that these were not just theoretical ideas.

Mayor Domenico Lucano

Domenico Lucano, known almost universally as Mimmo, was born in Melito di Porto Salvo in 1958 and moved to Riace when he was young. He worked as a chemistry teacher for most of his adult life and became involved in human rights and community activism in the late 1980s, before the Kurdish boat landing in 1998 gave his activism a specific and urgent focus.

He served as mayor of Riace from 2004 to 2018, initially working with the SPRAR system and later facing increasingly tense relations with Italian national governments. His background was unusual for a politician: he had no party affiliation, no legal or business training, and no formal ties to the machinery of Italian regional or national politics. His supporters described him as a man driven entirely by conviction; his critics argued that this same trait caused him to bypass rules he considered unjust or obstructive.

The international recognition Lucano received during his tenure as mayor was remarkable for someone from one of Italy's smallest and poorest municipalities.

In 2010, he was awarded third place in the World Mayor Prize, organised by the City Mayors Foundation, receiving a special commendation for his approach to helping refugees settle in Riace. The prize that year was won by the mayor of Mexico City; Lucano, representing a village of fewer than 2,000 residents, finished third in an international competition.

In 2016, Fortune magazine ranked him 40th on its list of the World's Greatest Leaders, citing his role in saving the village, revitalising its economy, and providing a model studied and adopted as Europe's refugee crisis intensified.

That same year, Pope Francis personally wrote to Lucano, invited him to the Vatican, and described the Riace experience as an example of best practice in refugee reception. In 2017, Lucano received the Dresden Peace Prize, whose citation noted that he was "a role model regardless of political conviction, skin colour, religious belief, and national borders," and added, with prescience, that "without the citizens of Riace, the brilliant ideas of the mayor would have been in vain."

The persecution of the Mayor

In 2018, Mayor Domenico Lucano was placed under house arrest as part of a police investigation known as Operation Xenia into suspected irregularities in the management of refugee reception funds. He was suspended from his position as mayor and, in a decision later overturned by the courts, was initially prohibited from residing in Riace. The charges he faced were serious and numerous, including allegations of criminal association, misappropriation of public funds, falsification of documents, and aiding illegal immigration.

The initial trial, held by the Tribunal of Locri, concluded in September 2021 with a sentence of 13 years and two months, nearly double the seven years and eleven months requested by the prosecution, sparking widespread disbelief across the Italian left and among international observers.

The Court of Appeal of Reggio Calabria significantly overturned this verdict in October 2023, reducing the sentence to 18 months, suspended, and acquitting Lucano of the most serious charges. In their written reasoning, the appeal judges described his mission as ‘to fuel an economy of hope, and "to help the most disadvantaged," and stated that he had acted with "an indisputable intent of solidarity" and had "never thought of making money from refugees." In February 2025, the Court of Cassation upheld the 18-month suspended sentence for the remaining charge of document falsification.

Under Italy's Severino Law, which excludes from public office those with definitive criminal convictions exceeding a certain threshold, this confirmation initiated a process of removal from the mayoralty to which Lucano had returned after his election in June 2024, concurrently with his election to the European Parliament as a member of the Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra list. The Prefecture of Reggio Calabria formalised his suspension from the mayoral duties in early 2026. Lucano has appealed this decision to the Court of Cassation and continues to serve as a Member of the European Parliament, where he has been an active voice on migration policy.

The community and people of Riace

It would be a distortion to portray the Riace model as the work of a single individual, or as universally accepted by everyone in the village. The full picture is more intricate.

Over its years of operation, the SPRAR programme created around 60 paid roles for local residents, who served as supervisors, coordinators, and support staff alongside refugee participants. For these families, the arrival of migrants brought income and employment to a town that previously had very little of either. The local school that reopened thanks to the demographic boost from the new arrivals was a benefit that extended throughout the community. Solidarity tourism, encouraged by the village's international profile, attracted visitors to Riace who spent money in local businesses. The crafts revived in the workshops, such as weaving, ceramics, and the production of preserves, drew on local traditions as well as the skills migrants brought with them.

But not all residents experienced this in the same way or with the same positivity. The village of Riace is geographically divided between the historic upper town and the coastal settlement of Riace Marina, whose residents had less direct involvement with the SPRAR programme and, in several documented accounts, less enthusiasm for it. Some believed that the model had created an economic ecosystem reliant on migrants without making the village itself more dynamic or self-sufficient in the long run. Others highlighted the pressures that came with a programme that, at its peak, brought hundreds of additional residents from many different countries, languages, and cultural backgrounds into a village of only 1,500 people.

These tensions are part of the record and should be recognised. Equally, it should be acknowledged that in June 2024, the people of Riace re-elected Domenico Lucano as mayor with over 46 per cent of the vote, defeating both the candidate of the incumbent Lega-backed administration and another challenger. This was Lucano's fourth election as mayor. The vote was not driven by forgetfulness or sentimentality; it was cast by a community that, having experienced the experiment in detail, knowing what the model produced and the cost of its dismantling, chose to return to its founding principles.

Bahram, a Kurdish man who was aboard the original 1998 boat and remained in Riace, has said of the village: "When I saw these mountains, I thought of Kurdistan, my home. The colours, the shapes, they were familiar." He became, in time, the longest-settled foreign resident of Riace, a living embodiment of the continuity the village chose.

Refugees who were present during the darkest years of the legal proceedings expressed their feelings clearly. When the model was being dismantled in 2018 and residents faced relocation, one woman, Tsehayneshe, who had come from Eritrea in 2003 and worked in the village's pottery workshop, simply said: "Here in Riace, it feels like the sun's been gone for some time now." She and her son refused to leave. A Kashmiri woman named Rafia Munir, who had fled in 2014 and found in the weaving workshop a connection to her grandparents' carpet-making traditions, described the moment the programme ended: "Mayor Lucano found us a new home. We wouldn't be here without his help."

The Riace Model today

The formal SPRAR programme in Riace was dismantled after Lucano's arrest in 2018. State funding was withdrawn, the organised reception project was closed, and many of the migrants who had been living in the village under the programme were dispersed to other locations across Italy. The population, which had reached 2,345 in 2016, decreased to its pre-model levels. The workshops closed, and the square grew quiet.

Between 2019 and 2024, Riace was governed by Antonio Trifoli, whose administration was elected on a platform of ending what he described as an unsustainable model. Trifoli himself was later declared ineligible for office by the Tribunal of Locri on a separate legal matter and left office before completing his term; a commissariat managed the municipality in the meantime. The far-right Lega-backed administration that had promised to dismantle the model left behind a village that was, by most accounts, quieter, emptier, and poorer than the one it had inherited.

Yet the model did not vanish. It went underground, supported by associations, activists, and former participants who refused to let it die completely.

The Città Futura (1) association, which was the original vehicle for the model's creation, continued to operate in Riace and uphold the principles on which it was founded. Its website, still active, describes its mission in terms that remain unchanged since 1999.

The Spostiamo Mari e Monti (2) association has, in recent years, made Riace a centre for its educational activities. Working with young people aged 18 to 25, it runs an annual summer camp in Riace focused on themes of migration, solidarity, peace, and human rights. The sixth edition, held in late July and early August 2025, brought participants to the village to engage with its history and its values.

One of the camp's symbolic moments is the annual reactivation of the Forno dei Popoli, the Oven of the Peoples, a community bread oven first inaugurated in 2021, where participants bake together in the open air as an act of communal solidarity. In 2025, the camp's activities included planting an olive tree dedicated to the ‘Righteous of Hospitality’, those who have shown courage and compassion in welcoming others, in the presence of human rights activist Patrick Zaki and judge Emilio Sirianni.

The Riace model has also inspired other villages in the neighbouring area. Camini, a few kilometres to the north, developed its own programme through the cooperative Jungi Mundi, which has rebuilt abandoned houses, hosted refugees and asylum seekers, and attracted international volunteers.

Acquaformosa, in the province of Cosenza, adopted a similar approach. The principles that Riace first articulated, that depopulation and displacement can be addressed together, and that welcome and economic regeneration are not in conflict, have taken root beyond the village that originated them.

Gaza

On 5 August 2025, Riace signed a twinning agreement with the Gaza Strip during a ceremony attended by a Palestinian woman who survived the war and arrived in Italy with her newborn daughter, born on the same day her eldest son was killed in a bombing. The agreement was signed in front of a small crowd and broadcast live to Gaza. It was a symbolic gesture. However, it was the kind of symbol Riace has always created: an assertion, from the smallest possible platform, that the logic of solidarity knows no borders, and that a village with barely 2,000 residents can extend its moral reach as far as it wishes.

Riace today is not the lively, internationally renowned Villaggio Globale of 2016. It is quieter, with fewer active workshops, and its population is gradually declining once more. However, it is not the ghost town it was in the early 1990s, nor is it the ghost town it risked becoming again after 2018.

The community that built the model, sustained it through years of legal assault, voted to restore it in 2024, and continues to tend its memory and its principles, is still there.

(1) Associazione Città Futura – Giuseppe Puglisi

Founded in Riace in 1999, Città Futura is the association that first organised the Riace model. Named in honour of Don Giuseppe Puglisi, the Sicilian priest murdered by the Mafia in 1993 for his work with young people, the association aimed to turn Riace into what its founders called una città dell'accoglienza, a city of welcome. Its projects have included restoring houses for refugee families, artisan workshops producing preserves, bread, wool, and olive oil, an eco-tourism initiative, and the bonus sociale, a local currency that allowed refugees to participate in the village economy while state disbursements were delayed. Città Futura remains active in Riace and continues to receive messages of solidarity from across Europe and beyond, its website serving as both an archive of the model and a living point of contact for those wishing to engage with it.

(2) Associazione Spostiamo Mari e Monti

Based in Turin, Spostiamo Mari e Monti is a civic education organisation that has made Riace one of its main focuses with young people. Every summer since 2020, it has organised the Riace Camp — an annual gathering for participants aged 18 to 25, centred around themes of migration, solidarity, peace, and human rights. The sixth edition, held in late July and early August 2025, included the planting of an olive tree dedicated to the Giusti dell'Accoglienza — the Righteous of Hospitality — in the presence of human rights advocate Patrick Zaki, and the relighting of the Forno dei Popoli (the Oven of the Peoples), a community bread oven first inaugurated in 2021 as a symbol of shared life in Riace. The association's broader programme includes civic education initiatives in Italian schools, a Gardens of the Righteous project, and participation in European memory and citizenship programmes. It is among several organisations that have helped ensure Riace remains a place of active participation rather than just memory.

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Candidates for the 2026 Solidarity Prize

Confirmed candidates, as of May 2026: Riace, Calabria, Italy || Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany || Zwolle, Overijssel, Netherlands || Oliveri, Sicily, Italy || Legazpi, Basque Country, Spain || Northallerton, Yorkshire, UK || Graz, Styria, Austria || Val-de-Reuil, Normandy, France || Montpellier, France || Santo Stefano del Sole, Avellino, Italy || Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany || Edmonton, Alberta, Canada ||

Please nominate further towns and cities. The list of candidates will be updated regularly.

Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Introduction to the Solidarity Prize || Nominees from North America. || Nominess from Europe ||

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