In-depth

Italy has long been an attractive destination for people seeking better job opportunities, but not everyone comes just for a paycheck—some move for love, education, or other opportunities that Italy offers. Below, we follow three women in their reasons for choosing Italy to make their new home.

Sadiqa Mushtaq, businesswoman and director of a health institute in Afghanistan, is an emblematic figure of a journey of resilience and challenge. Mushtaq has always fought courageously to improve Afghan women’s living conditions, defying convention and facing adversity with her whole being. But the return of the Taliban to power shattered the dreams of an entire generation. Forced to leave her country, Mushtaq found refuge in Italy, but her indomitable spirit and determination have not waned. An interview.

1975, 1982, 2006, 2024… dates that resonate like the sound of a shrill war alarm in the minds and memories of the people living in the tiny country that is Lebanon. Caught between the region’s war-mongering powers—Israel and Iran in particular—Lebanon witnesses deadly tensions every time the region flares up.

Despite political and social challenges, female Tunisian visual artists, actresses, and dancers are transforming the street into a space for creativity and freedom.

Peddling saleswomen in the Cairo metro system are classified as informal workers, operating without an official work contract or social insurance. This category of workers has been ignored for years. But the stories of these saleswomen are harsh, and they can be read on their faces, on the constant fear and anxiety legible in their features.

Female workers in the profession of harkous painting in Tunisia suffer from social rejection and are targeted by security forces. Though this profession is part of Tunisian heritage, it has not been given adequate care by the government, and the women who work in it face various violations in the streets, violations that are compounded by a miserable economic situation.

With her wrinkled face browned from the sun, her white hair and tired eyes, Umm Youssef watches the passersby in Bab Tuma Square in Damascus. Sometimes, she wanders away, but customers call her back and she rushes to make coffee in front of her car. Everything she needs is in that car, even the gas cylinder and material she needs to prepare hot drinks.

The streets of Algiers reveal an often-ignored reality: that of unhoused women who, every day, must confront discomfort, danger, hunger, and indifference. Among them, many women, alone or with their children, bear the weight of extreme marginalization living in the streets. Far from being mere statistics, they embody the hidden face of a growing social crisis.

At present, women of 35 nationalities are working as sex workers in Rome. Who are these women? What brought them to the Italian capital? This investigation, conducted by two of our correspondents in Rome, Federica Araco and Nathalie Galesne, attempts to find the answers to these questions.

The Mediterranean basin is vast. Its scenes of everyday life, with women busy in the streets, are numerous. Despite the rights and freedoms that women have won in recent decades through feminist struggle, public space in many towns and villages on both shores of the Mediterranean is still a territory dominated by the masculine plural.