She wrote: “To see migrants lounging around on benches in places like Forte dei Marmi, living off the 35 euros a day that they get from us, is really too much.” Ms Moric, who was born in what is now Croatia and supports a far-Right, anti-immigration movement called Casa Pound, insisted that her post was also a joke.
She said she would never have mistaken Jackson and Johnson for African migrants. But many people on Facebook took the image at face value, apparently convinced that the two men in the photo were indeed migrants who somehow had enough money to go designer shopping in one of the country’s smartest resorts.
“This is the Italy where we prefer to give 35 euros a day to Communist cooperatives in order to support layabouts rather than make them work and produce wealth,” one Italian man wrote. A woman called Roberta wrote: “Immigrants go home”, while another wrote: “Don’t tell me these people are fleeing from war, because I don’t believe it.”