Italian mayor bans beggars from city centre

Mayor issues 45-day decree to 'protect urban decorum and livability'

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The mayor of Como, a city in the northern Italian province of Lombardy, has passed a controversial law banning begging and camping in the city centre.

Mario Landriscina, the city’s recently elected centre-right mayor, issued a 45-day decree on Friday 15 December which aims to “protect urban decorum and livability”.

Those in contravention of the decree face a fine ranging between €50 to €300 and are responsible for “restoring the state of the premises at their own expense”.

Officials said the decree follows a rise in the number of beggars and homeless, claiming some get “drunk and perform their physiological needs” in central parts of the city, reports The Local. The accompanying press release said that these problems became more apparent over the Christmas holidays when there are more visitors in the city centre; Como is a popular tourist destination due to its proximity to Lake Como and the Alps.

The Mayor said he had ”chosen an administrative tool already adopted in other cities”.

The decree specifically targets both those who are begging proactively by approaching people and asking for money, and those who are passively begging with signs.

Not everyone is happy with the decision: “The Como ban is negative and unacceptable,” don Virginio Colmegna, president of the Casa Della Carità Foundation in Milan, tells The Independent. “Yet it is part of an alarming list of measures against homeless and beggars.

“In Italy, unfortunately, too many politicians criminalise the poor. Too often homeless people and beggars have been kicked out of town centres, away from shop windows and bars tables.

“Too many times marginalised people have been pushed into the outskirt of the cities, where it is more and more difficult for them to survive.

“The Como ban will not solve anything. Poverty is not a street cleaning problem. It is a social problem which needs social interventions. Measures like this just make homeless people’s living conditions worse and worse.

“Furthermore, they increase the stigmatisation of poor people: they are not considered human beings but ’a waste’, as Pope Francis says.”

Como is not the first place to ban begging.

In 2016, the mayor of coastal town Bordighera, close to the French border, issued a law that made giving money to beggars an offence punishable by a fine. In November of this year, police in the city of Hyderabad rounded up beggars ahead of a summit attended by Ivanka Trump, with at least 200 transported out of the city centre by authorities.