I met Innocent during one of my first visits to Hotel Le Grazie, in June 2017. I had gone there to try and meet Janice, the head of Centri d’Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Centres for asylum seekers, or CAS) operations of Gruppo Umana Solidarietà (GUS), the subcontractor managing the hotel (see Chapter 2). As she usually avoided my repeated phone calls or had her assistant reply to them saying that she was away, I would often show up at her office chancing an encounter. Sometimes I did meet her, but she would rush into her car or another room telling me ‘we are extremely busy, if you want to talk to me come back in winter’. I did, but also the following January I was denied audience. Bar a courteous encounter during a pilot visit to Macerata in 2016, she actively, and progressively with more force, attempted to hamper my research efforts. In 2018, she banned me from all her CAS, even if there was no legal basis for doing so, as I confirmed with a Prefettura official. I nevertheless continued visiting Le Grazie throughout the years, reassured by the fact that those trips would never be wasted, always filled with new encounters.

In one of these visits, I introduced myself to Innocent, another Nigerian national and a man from Ghana, who were seated in one of the parking lot's few shaded areas, with a large rooster enclosed in a cage behind them. I told them that I had come to meet Janice but that she wasn't there and made my by then well-rehearsed ethics-compliant introductory spiel about research objectives, confidentiality and safeguarding, which was met with puzzled gazes.