Around Latina, south of Rome, in the reclaimed marshland of the Agro Pontino, several tens of thousands of Punjabis work in agriculture, principally in dairy and market gardening. Italian mozzarella production depends substantially on Punjabi labour with buffalo.
The community began arriving in the 1980s and 1990s and is now the second largest Punjabi population in continental Europe. There is a gurdwara at Sabaudia and others across the province.
Working conditions have been the subject of Italian investigations into caporalato, illegal labour brokering, with documented cases of very long hours, below-minimum pay and debt bondage among Indian farm workers in the area.
In 2016 several thousand Indian workers struck in the Latina area over pay and conditions, which was the first such action by that community in Italy.
Buffalo husbandry is a Punjabi skill and it is the reason the community is where it is. That is a direct transfer of village technique from the Doaba and Malwa to central Italy inside one generation.
It is not only Latina. There are Punjabi communities through the Po valley dairy belt around Cremona, Brescia, Mantua and Reggio Emilia, working cattle for the Parmigiano Reggiano and Grana Padano producers, and the same skill accounts for that placement too.
Most hold residence permits tied to an employer, which is what makes a bad labour relationship hard to leave, and a child born in Italy to foreign parents does not become Italian at birth but has to apply as an adult after unbroken residence.
None of this has been written about in Punjabi. The material that exists is in Italian, in union reports, journalism and prosecution files, and the people who are its subject cannot read it.