Italy’s top story on Wednesday:

Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Lucano, the former mayor of the southern Italian town of Riace, staged a comeback on Monday with his dual reelection as mayor and election to European Parliament with Italy’s Greens and Left Alliance.

Lucano was internationally celebrated for his pro-migrant policies that gained Riace a reputation as a ‘global village’, but in 2018 he was charged with crimes including abuse of office related to aiding and abetting legal immigration, and later sentenced to more than 13 years in prison.

Lucano’s allies argued at the time that he was scapegoated by then-Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the anti-immigrant League party. Last October, the Court of Appeal overturned almost all of the convictions and reduced the politician’s term to an 18-month suspended sentence for forgery.

Interviewed by La Repubblica newspaper on Tuesday, Lucano vowed to take to Europe “the story of this community which transmitted a message of humanity to the world and found a way to resist, not to die”.

Battle in courts between Italy and migrant rescue charities

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s battle with migrant rescue charities is increasingly ending up in court, with judges often siding with NGOs but not yet calling the law into question, AFP reported.

Meloni’s hard-right government last year imposed new restrictions on the charity ships that rescue migrants adrift in the Central Mediterranean, and many of them have been detained – sometimes repeatedly – for breaking the law.

While Italian courts have overturned several such detention orders, they have yet to identify potential flaws in the law that could favour the NGOs in the future.

Last week, a court in Reggio Calabria in southern Italy ruled that a detention order that sought to immobilise the German rescue boat Sea-Eye 4 for 60 days was unlawful.

That order was dated March 11, four days after the ship’s crew had rescued 84 migrants, including 36 children, off the coast of Libya.

Worker killed in paint factory explosion

A worker was killed in a paint factory explosion outside the northern Italian city of Monza on Tuesday, according to news agency Ansa. No one else was reported harmed.

The incident is the latest in a string of fatal workplace accidents in Italy, including the deaths of five maintenance workers who inhaled toxic fumes at a sewage treatment plant in Sicily in May and seven men killed in an explosion at a hydroelectric plant outside Bologna in April.

Italian unions have staged repeated protests over Italy’s high worker death rate in recent months, filling a historic piazza in Rome with a thousand coffins in March and calling a nationwide strike in May.

Data released last week by INAIL, Italy’s state-run Workers Compensation Authority, showed that 286 people were killed at work in Italy in the first four months of 2024, while reports of workplace injuries were up 3.6 percent compared to the same period in 2023.

Italian mayor investigated for mafia association

The mayor of Reggio Calabria, the capital of Italy’s southern Calabria region, was placed under investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of involvement with the region’s ‘Ndrangheta mafia, Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper reported.

Mayor Giuseppe Falcomatà, a member of Italy’s centre-left Democratic Party, and regional councillor Giuseppe Neri, of the ruling Brothers of Italy party, were two of the high-profile names caught up in a police probe into mafia-related voter fraud.

The ‘Ducale’ investigation concerns alleged offences committed during Calabria’s 2020 and 2021 regional elections and the 2020 municipal elections in Reggio Calabria, centring on claims that votes were delivered by a clan boss in exchange for public appointments.

Falcomatà on Tuesday told journalists he was “fully respectful of the judiciary’s activities, in which I have full confidence”.

G7 police housed in decrepit cruise ship

Italian police providing security for this week’s G7 summit were given new accommodation on Tuesday after their union complained they had been “packed like mice” onto a rundown cruise ship, news agency AFP reported on Tuesday.

“Many police, after long hours of travel, were forced to sleep in precarious conditions on a cruise ship or in cramped vans due to lack of rooms,” the regional SILF union representing Italy’s financial police said in a statement published to their Facebook page on Monday.

Italy’s department for public security later confirmed they were being moved, saying the “logistical and hygienic-sanitary conditions… did not correspond to contractual conditions,” AFP reported.

Police and soldiers across Italy have been deployed to the area for the June 13-15 summit, being held at the five-star Borgo Egnazia resort between Bari and Brindisi on the Adriatic coast.