Interior Minister Angelino Alfano on Thursday defended his use recently of what many say is a derogatory term to describe street vendors in Italy, many of whom are Indian and African.
The minister sparked controversy on Monday when he called for a crackdown on street vendors, using the slang term "vuccumpra'" to describe them.
"There was no racist connotation. It was a tempest in a teacup of hypocrisy," Alfano said on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where he is on hand to thank Italian servicemen and women deployed in the ongoing Mare Nostrum migrant search-and-rescue mission. The term is Neapolitan dialect for "Do you want to buy this?", and was originally used in a derogatory way to describe impoverished Neapolitan, or generally southern, street vendors.
Southern Italians have since been replaced on Italy's streets and beaches by more recent arrivals from Africa and Asia, who inherited the term.
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