‘We have 16 nationalities here’, enthused Mamadou after I introduced myself and told him that I was conducting field research for a project on asylum seekers’ accommodation. This was my first visit to the Hotel House, a 17-storey residential building in Porto Recanati, a small but seasonally bustling coastal municipality in the Macerata province. ‘We have Nigerians, Pakistanis, Afghans, Ghana, Romania, Togo …’, he said, naming 11 or so nationalities/countries, and then stumbling and starting again from Nigerians. My research is specifically concerned with asylum seekers, I interrupted. Do any of them live here? ‘Oh, we have them all’, he said, adamant:

I declined, wondering if he was offering me a discount or if it was a case of bad maths.

Mamadou seemed to know each person entering and exiting the building and was able to modulate his exchanges with them accordingly. In the brief time I spent with him, he received a small bundle of 50-euro notes from a West African man who started shouting at him in a language I could not identify, and to whom he responded calmly. He raised instead his voice and gesticulated while giving stern instructions in French to a group of three Senegalese nationals crossing the lobby on the way out of the building.