The North Africans lay out their poster-size Botticelli and Michelangelo reproductions in long rows down the cobblestones of Via Independenzia so that they overlap each one over the next an inch or two. This is so that when one of them spot approaching Carabineirei in their sporty Euro cars, and give the tell-tale pitched whistle, they can gather a row of 20 or 30 pictures in a second by pushing the first under the second and so on up the street. In this way, any street in the vicinity of il Duomo in Florence, at one moment paved with such poster reproductions, can be swept of them, and their merchants, fast as a flash.

When the menacing Carabineriei float by, tired eyes lazily drifting past the faces now retreated into the shadows behind pillars and in doorways, they leave as quietly as they entered. It takes the merchants all of three seconds to set up shop once more without a single possible sale missed.

Surrounding this constantly evolving and forever re-enacted play between African picture merchants and white Carabinerei is the heady air of ancient sculptures, dead churches, and frozen monuments on the one hand, and hordes of foreign visitors constantly squeezing shutter releases on cameras through which they squint, usually up, where there is the least danger of catching each other, or anyone else, in the shot.

The Renaissance art spectaculars has lured the mostly Americans from the safety of their suburban Ohio street, and on these so dislodged Americans do the Africans feed, who in turn are preyed upon by the Italian police, completing some kind of oblonged circle.

The protagonists in this tale are the Africans. The police, who feed on them, the Americans they feed on, and the ancient Italians who have created the extraordinarily rich feeding grounds, are dead, in one sense or another. It is the Africans who are moving, shifting, thinking, plotting, and therefore digging their own entrenchment in this land upon which so many others have, through wiles and stratagems of their own, entrenched themselves here. The culture of Florence looks on the surface to be half mutated to American culture, but closer examination of the splicing of the genetic code here finds African code, not American, inserting itself into the Italian gene.

North of Florence, in Bologna, the Africans are no longer playing games with the police in the open wilds of the streets. They are ahead there, now working in bona fide shops. The transformation is so rapid, that a significant difference can be easily noticed in the space of cities only hours apart. In another generation, the Africans will own the businesses they currently work in. In another generation, they will own the buildings in which their businesses are conducted. The generation after that, Italy will be as African as it is European.

Bologna has the absolute lowest birthrate in the world. Immigration is necessary to supply the job market, since native Italians have simply stopped having children. This is not the surprise it seems: Italians are very clerical, but never very religious. This is the story all over Europe, though in Germany, Hungary, and so on, it is Asians, not Africans, and in Britain, it is the Gulf States.

But unlike other notable demographic invasions, European governing institutions, being newly (in terms of the sweep of history) democratic, present a different defense. Besides the thick walled castles and pre-emptive crusades of the sorry past, democracy will show itself at its absolute most valuable, for instead of mounting tensions between communities going through flux in their relative powers, democracy releases the steam and allows government to evolve and adapt.

Newly emergent communities will employ the tools of democracy to acquire power, and having done so, will preserve democratic institutions that served them so well. The institutions will remain as Europe becomes here more African, there more Asian, and over there more Middle Eastern.

In other words, Europe is poised to become the world's first totally globalized cosmopolitan centre. As new communities acquire the equality, freedom, and justice in the institutions of Europe, they will blossom culturally, as all communities in the past have, upon reaching Europe. The knowledge and creativity locked up in African and Asian minds will, like knowledge locked up in Arabic minds prior to being unleashed to a receptive Europe 500 years ago, will bring on a renaissance in Italy first, again.

The first Renaissance, in the 11th C, introduced the new concept of history. The second, 400 years later in the 15th C, introduced the concept of science. The third, 500 years hence, is upon Europe this moment. What it will bring is unknown yet.

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