Some stuff about racism in Italy. This is not a definitive account by any means, just some personal observations from what I've witnessed or read about. People who live there have a closer view of it than I do.
There was the time our house got broken into in Italy about ten years ago and the cops wrote it off as "probably Gypsies" and didn't even investigate. With no camera recording or witnesses, just evidence of a break-in, they felt like the burglar must be Romani based on just racist vibes.
Nowadays even many racist politicians know to call them Romani ("rom" in the Italian language, as Romani or Roma would be about the city of Rome), but they still use the same racist stereotypes regardless of using the correct word. During the last electoral campaign, a politician humiliated a Romani woman on the streets of Florence, beckoning her in to wave to the camera with him before saying, "Vote for us so you never see her again in the city of Florence."
Also there's this famous movie from the 1970's that is almost entirely about Swiss people being racist to Italian migrant workers (based on the real experiences of Italians at the time). But if you point this out to modern day Italian xenophobes, they're quick to say it's different when they are racist to immigrants coming to Italy because...something something something. I once heard someone say in front of me, "there are too many immigrants in Italy, I'm moving to Switzerland!"
There was a lot of racism against Romanian immigrants at one point (and there probably still is! I just haven't personally heard it lately), which was ironic because the same people would hire Romanian home health aides to care for their aging relatives. Good enough to look after their parents but not good enough to treat right.
The bigotry of northern Italians against southern Italians that was very strong in the 20th century gave rise to the saying "sei sempre il terrone di qualcun altro" with "terrone" being a nasty slur for southerner. The translation would be "You're always someone else's [slur]," because no matter how high and mighty and racist you are in your personal hometown, there's some other country or area in Europe where people will be as prejudiced to you as [the implicitly northern Italian] you are to southerners.
The political party the League used to be called the Northern League, and when they later started focusing on hating immigrants instead of hating southerners, they just dropped the "Northern." I gather they haven't had so much electoral success in the south, though; people don't easily forget how you treated them just because you have a new target now.
And Italy has the anti-black racism that's commonly understood in the US too. There have been two mass shootings in the last fifteen years targeting Africans, which is notable because there are hardly any mass shootings in Italy at all. A racist killer targeted Senegalese people in Florence in 2011, and in 2018 a racist mass shooter targeted black people in the town of Macerata following an unrelated murder committed in the same town by a black immigrant. Of course, if a white Italian person commits murder, which obviously is more usual in Italy, there's no rampage against white people.
And black people are often assumed to be immigrants/noncitizens/not Italian even if they were born and raised in Italy and speak the language fluently. It's very hard to get citizenship if you are not descended from another Italian citizen, but they're widely assumed not to have it even if they do. And every time there's an effort to make it easier for kids who are raised and educated in Italy to acquire citizenship when they grow up (ius scholae), it's stopped by racist politicians.
Racism in Italy, at least the kind I've observed, is often tied to assumptions about class and money. The hatred is so often against the poor migrant worker (at first from a different region, now often from a different country), which is ironic given the long history of Italians immigrating to other countries as migrant workers. In that respect, the usual mode of Italian racism seems to me quite similar to American racism to Mexican and Central American people--the racist assumption that they're possibly "illegals," definitely outsiders, ruining the country for sure, and oh, could you do backbreaking work while being paid low wages in awful conditions? Immigrant farmworkers in Italy are particularly victim to exploitation and violence on the job from landowners, organized crime/mafia, and exploitative contract agencies.
So the racism is somewhat differently expressed compared to US anti-black racism because it's not based on the legacy of slavery, but it still leads to black people being targeted by shooters just like in Buffalo.
And have I mentioned how we really haven't faced up to the massacres our country committed, particularly in Ethiopia and Libya, during the Fascist/colonial period (often overlapping)? The fact that we were ineffective at colonization in the long run compared to France or Britain, and that Italy was later occupied by Nazi Germany, is often used to ignore that we used the same brutality.
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