Patras – In the winter of 1945, thousands of Italian families living in Greece were ordered to gather at the port of Patras. There, the corvettes Patrai and Thermopylai carried them back to Italy, bringing an abrupt end to a migration story that had begun decades earlier when many Italians moved to Greece in search of opportunities unavailable in the Kingdom of Italy. Around 3,000 people were affected, many of them residents of Patras. Efforts by Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi to halt the repatriation of Italians living in Greece proved unsuccessful. The forced return came after years marked by war, Fascist Italy’s invasion of Greece, the breakdown of integration between the Italian community and local society, and the internment camps of Goudi, Argos and Nea Kokkinia. This little-known chapter of history is the subject of Via di Caciolle, Patras, a historical novel by Spiros Stella, recently presented in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi Sacrati. The author was joined by Tuscany regional president Eugenio Giani, regional councillor Marco Stella and other speakers. “The Greek Quarter, as the area around Via di Caciolle became known, emerged in the 1950s in newly built apartment blocks financed through the Fanfani housing programme,” Giani explained. “These developments were intended to address the severe post-war housing shortage and became home not only to Florentines but also to the community of return migrants whose story is told in this book with dignity and clarity.” Giani noted that Florence and Tuscany have long been shaped by migration and re-migration, creating opportunities for different communities to build meaningful forms of cultural and human coexistence. After arriving in Bari in 1945, around 2,000 people—considered neither fully Italian nor fully Greek—were housed in a former military barracks on Via della Scala in Florence, which remained a refugee centre until 1956. By the late 1950s, many families relocated to public housing on Via di Caciolle, finding work at local factories such as Pignone and Gover or at the San Lorenzo market. Through a deeply personal family story, Stella reconstructs the experience of the Italian-Greek community against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Florence. “Via di Caciolle was not a ghetto, and it is not one today,” said Marco Stella, whose own family was part of that community. “It was a place of dreams, hopes and opportunity—a kind of social laboratory where people from very different cultural backgrounds learned to live together. My father was born in Patras in 1944 and moved to Florence as an infant. I am proud to be the son of a refugee. This book sheds light on a story that is both Florentine and profoundly Italian.” According to Stella, the book speaks of social mobility, hardship, prejudice and the challenge of adapting to a new country, while highlighting the determination of people who never stopped working and dreaming. The San Lorenzo market, he noted, became one of the places where different worlds met without excluding one another. “I wrote this book to honour a promise I made to my father,” Spiros Stella said. “He did not want this story—with all its personal, emotional and collective dimensions—to be forgotten. It is a story of arrivals, departures and returns.” Stella also pointed to the enduring ties between Florence and Patras. Today, he noted, the mayor of Patras is a cardiologist who studied and graduated in Florence and has promoted restoration projects aimed at preserving the city’s nineteenth-century architectural heritage, much of it designed by Italian architects. “Even today,” Stella said, “visitors to Patras can still see what was built through the skill, ingenuity and hard work of generations of Italians who helped shape much of the city’s remaining architectural beauty.” (9colonne)