The Carabinieri came knocking at night, sometime around 10.30 p.m. Cosmin, his wife Olga, and two other Romanians in their cramped two room flat-cum-converted garage were about to go to bed. Instead, they found themselves taking a bus ride to police headquarters in central Rome. Within 36 hours, they were on a flight back to Bucharest.
So ended Cosmin's 18-month long stay in Italy, lived mainly in our village, north of Rome. Cosmin, Olga and friends were just some of the estimated 360,000 (the figure may well be much higher) clandestine immigrants who at any time may be found working in Italy's underground economy. And there's the rub. Cosmin, like many of his compatriots, worked, indeed worked hard. Unlike a minority of clandestine immigrants, he did not steal cars, rob houses, peddle drugs or run a prostitution ring. He and others like him fulfilled a role in this particular community as he was willing to do a variety of labouring jobs that local young men no longer want. Lay a path, build a wall, cut down a tree, fix a broken pipe, plant a row of lettuce - you name it, Cosmin could do it. Like many of the East Bloc migrants, he combined manual skills with endless energy and cheerful good will.
Cosmin worked seven days a week, usually moving on to clean up a couple of gardens each evening at the end of his working day on a building site, saving all the while. Nor was he an exception. On the day after the Carabinieri "round-up", the late-night arrests generated much worried village debate. Farmers, builders, artisans and others wondered what they would do if and when all the Romanians and Poles were repatriated. Half jokingly, one or two tradesmen suggested that they might as well shut up shop.
Some vowed to immediately set out on the long and difficult process of taking their "illegal" non-EU workers out of the black economy and into legal employment, complete with social security payments.
Talking to villagers over the last few days, it was impossible to find anyone who was glad that the clandestine immigrants had been "lifted". Clearly, the presence of the clandestini suits those who find themselves with a hard-working, ever-willing and often lowly paid workforce for who they make no social security payments.
Village reaction, however, is about more than just cynical financial considerations. Many villagers have come to know and like the various Romanians, Albanians and Poles who have been part of the local landscape for the last 15 years or more - one of those "lifted" last week had lived here for nine years.
Friendships have been formed, some of the villagers have visited family homes in Poland, while more significantly, some of the female immigrants have married into this community. This is also a village where within living memory people can recall a time when shoes and running water were luxury items.
Such folks can empathise with someone like Cosmin, a bricklayer by trade but forced to emigrate by the harshness of a post-Ceaucescu economy in which he might earn $25 a month, if things went well.
When things went less well, he worked the family's two acre plot with horse and plough, making it yield enough fruit and vegetables to avoid going hungry.
Given the illegal bus rides, costing about $4,000, which brought Olga and Cosmin separately to Italy, they had been forced to leave behind their seven year old daughter, entrusting her to neighbours. Once a week, Olga and Cosmin would ring home on their cell phone to talk to their daughter. On hearing their voices, the little girl would immediately began to cry, asking when would they be coming home.
For her the good news is that mammy and daddy are home for Christmas. For Cosmin and Olga, too, the good news is that they are home with the money they saved. The bad news is that they have been flown back to square one, facing dire economic prospects.
Last week, the voice in tears on the other end of the line was that of Olga, in a bus on her way to the airport: "Do something for us, signora, please," she pleaded. Only EU enlargement can do anything meaningful for her and millions like her in Eastern Europe.