Urban Ethnobotany: selection process of a foreign community integrated in Milan, North of Italy.

Fabrizia Milani 1, Martina Bottoni 1, Maria Matilde Luisa Benzoni 2, Maria Vittoria Calvi 2, Piero Bruschi 3, Claudia Giuliani 1, Gelsomina Fico 1

Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Milan 1, Department of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Mediations, University of Milan 2, Department of Agricultural, Environmental, Food and Forestry Science and Technology, University of Florence 3

While rural communities shift from natural environments to highly anthropized ones, the paradigm of ethnobotany shifts as well: humans, no more in daily contact with their original surroundings, venture in search of familiar or ‘substituents’ plant species in the new urban setting. If this is true when moving within the context of the same country, it is even truer when migrating from nation to nation. Undoubtedly, when diverse cultures meet in an urban scenery, remarkable phenomena of cultural exchange and contamination occur, framed within processes of reterritorialization. These intercultural phenomena are thus the main subject of study of the Urban Ethnobotany, an ever more investigated branch of ethnobotany worldwide. Though Italy has become, especially in the last decades, destination of migratory dynamics from other countries and is characterized by the presence of multiple international communities, urban ethnobotany is still largely overlooked throughout Italian territory and literature on it is still scarce. Within the framework of a three-year project titled “BE ETHNO: sharing traditions, sharing plants, sharing place, sharing future” (2024-2027, ID:2023-1454, Cariplo Foundation) we planned an ethnobotanical survey in an urban setting (Milan, Italy) with the involvement of one of the main immigrant communities. In fact, the very first phase of this project was aimed at the selection of the international community of interest, followed by bibliographic research on said community and their pluri-cultural and naturalistic landscape. According to the Annual Reports on the Presence of Migrants by the Italian Ministry of Labor and Social Policy and the Italian National Statistics Institute, in 2023 the total number of resident immigrants in Italy was 5,253,658, while the most numerous extra UE nationalities were Albania, Morocco, China, Ukraine, Bangladesh, India, Philippines, Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Moldova, Tunisia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and North Macedonia. [1,2]. Lombardy is considered the region with the highest concentration of non-UE nationalities (n=1,203,138) [2]. Specifically, Milan is the third municipality in Lombardy for number of immigrants (n= 301.149; year 2023) and it especially hosts Egyptians (n=45,457), Filipinos (38,942), Chinese (37,041), and Peruvians (17,799) [3]. These preliminary data show that the Peruvian pluricultural community is one of the most prominent in Milan, as immigration of Peruvians to Italy began as early as the 1980s. Moreover, considering the presence of various generations of new Italians of Peruvian origin and the circulation of young people with higher education and entrepreneurial projects from various regions of this mega-diverse country, this community is one of the most integrated, and willing to preserve and share its traditions. Moreover, both prior personal and recent-onset work acquaintances with Peruvian mediators and scholars tilted the balance towards the selection of the Peruvian community. These connections proved vital for establishing initial contact in Milan and building links with Peruvian universities for potential academic exchanges. Finally, they were pivotal for the detection of Peruvian local Floras, useful for the analysis of the naturalistic and floristic landscape in preparation to the first interviews with Peruvian informants established in Milan. References: [1] https://immigrazione.it/docs/2024/ml-xiv-rapporto-gli-stranieri-nel-mercato-del-lavoro-in-Italia-2024.pdf [2] http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx [3] https://sisi.comune.milano.it/

Main author career stage: Postdoc / Fellow

Contribution type: Talk

First choice session: 6. Plants, Fungi and Society

Second choice session: 3. Biodiversity and global change