La Zattera: quando l'accoglienza restituisce tempo

This article reflects on the experience of La Zattera, a hospitality community based in Palermo, founded in 2008 as a place of hospitality and shared life with migrants. Combining community memory, social engagement, and political commitment, the article describes the development of the community and its understanding of hospitality as an everyday practice of solidarity, encounter, and relationship-building. Particular attention is paid to the role of time in migrants’ lives and in their pathways towards autonomy. Drawing on the experience of communal living, the article shows how processes of inclusion and self-determination require temporalities that often conflict with those imposed by migration policies and bureaucratic procedures. In a context marked by increasingly restrictive border policies and the growing marginalisation of migrants, La Zattera is presented as a space that operates outside dominant regimes of migration governance, enabling migrants to reclaim and shape their own time and life trajectories.