Summer 1966

Meriem, Gigi and Tina are three friends, respectively a Sunni Muslim, a Catholic of Sicilian origin and a Jew, who live in Goulette, the outermost neighbourhood of the Bay of Tunis; they attend the same manual arts institute and are close to graduating. They chat about everything and in particular the differences between their traditions: but when it comes to feelings, things get complicated for everyone. In fact, the three boys they flirt with represent, at least on paper, the worst possible choices: Meriem likes Salvatore the Sicilian, Gigi is in love with Jojo the Jew while Tina ends up in the arms of Yusuf the Muslim.

Their families would go into a rage if they knew; on the other hand, the girls decide to take their liberties and make a pact. On the day of Our Lady of Tunis, during the celebrations in which they all participate, they will go off with their moroshes and make love secretly for the first time. Obviously things do not go as planned, and they laugh about misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

War in the air

Meanwhile, though, the village madman is in an uproar about more than that: with the radio glued to his ear he runs screaming that war is about to break out. The girls’ fathers have made peace, but the calm between the communities is about to shatter: the six-day war has broken out between Israel and Egypt. Following continuous attacks on Jewish properties – some of them Italian – in the city and beyond, thousands are forced to leave: it is a side effect of the war. In the same years, Italians also leave for reasons worth explaining.

If the Jewish presence in the country was more than two thousand years old, the Italian presence was also long-standing: during the 19th century in particular, emigration from the peninsula increased steadily, so much so that at the beginning of the last century there were about one hundred thousand Italians in the capital alone. The numbers began to fall after the end of the French protectorate in 1956 due to increasingly stringent labour laws. Europeans, and Italians more than others, occupied all kinds of jobs in industry, agriculture, trade and services, while the unemployment rate among locals was very high. This is why President Habib Bourghiba initiated nationalist policies such as the Manpower Law of 1961, which restricted employment opportunities for dependent foreigners, and the collectivist land reform of May 1964, which nationalised foreign-owned arable land. As if this were not enough, neighbouring Algeria had been at war for eight long years and the fear that the conflict would spill over was alive. Leaving, in short, had also become a necessity for Italians as an unintended consequence of post-colonial policies.

Yet another diaspora

It followed that the Jews found new accommodation in France or Israel, while the Italians who did not avail themselves of the option of settling beyond the Alps undertook to return to the country of origin of which they had lost memory. And the beginning was dramatic: those who had no relatives willing to take them in ended up in internment camps such as the Fraschette camp in Alatri, near Frosinone, waiting to be sent elsewhere; this meant living in horrible conditions for months, if not years. This was an unforeseen development because the Italian Republic had no means or structures in place to facilitate their social and economic reintegration.

Among them was the Pendola family, who had run away from Sicily many years before following a bloody incident: their father had unwittingly witnessed a murder among brigands and, in order not to be killed, embarked that night to flee to the other side of the Mediterranean. They made their fortune, even financially, but it ended badly. The story is recounted in a book of memoirs that makes us reflect because it explains well that those who returned, in the end, had nothing Italian about them: they had been educated in French, but lived the manners and culture of Tunisia. To quote Paolo Mieli, the Italians who returned became returnees without a homeland.

Boughedir’s message

Returning to Ferid Boughedir’s Un été à La Goulette from which we started, the film’s message is clear: regardless of one’s ethnicity and religion, each individual is immersed in a network of social relations for which he or she is only partly responsible; if he or she is brave enough, he or she can try to challenge them, but on a superficial level, so to speak, of proximity. Those higher up are beyond one’s reach, which is why, for example, political decisions made thousands of miles away can damage the lives of entire communities. In our case, two of these communities, which were contiguous to each other, suffered the adverse reactions of events for which they had no responsibility. On the one hand, Tunisian Jews were indirect victims of the Middle East conflict, which was unfair and moreover illogical because part of the community was even anti-Zionist.

On the other hand, the Italians, being so many and having the economic power in their hands, ended up arousing envy among the French first and the Tunisian nationalists later – and making them pay the price. And this happened then as now: the war in Gaza exposed Jews all over the world to new waves of anti-Semitism, just as the resumption of the Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh conflict a few years ago gave Armenians living in the Near East a hard time. On such side effects, unfortunately, it is very difficult to intervene.

Read more:

• Un été à La Goulette by Ferid Boughedir (1996)

• Du TGM au TGV. Une histoire tunisienne by Ruggero Gabbai (2025)

• The Far Shore by Marinette Pendola, Arkadia 2022 (first edition Sellerio, 2000)

• ‘Italians of Tunisia. From migration to forced exodus’, Past and Present with Paolo Mieli, guest Leila El Houssi, 16 February 2023, RAI. Available online (free registration required):

• The Jews in Algeria and Tunisia. 1940-1943 by Filippo Petrucci, Giuntina (2011)