The child forced to hide

The time is Switzerland in the 1960s. Due to the then-current seasonal work laws, many foreign workers were not allowed to reunite with their families, and therefore many were not allowed to bring their children with them. However, when the decision to migrate was made, many found it impossible to leave their children at home. This situation forced families to keep their children hidden to avoid deportation and losing their jobs. The homes of migrant workers, often tiny and cramped, became a world for these little ones, forced to live like prisoners.

In his novel Nino. The Hidden Child (Töpffer Edizioni, 2026, €18.00, 254 pages), Italian-born Swiss photojournalist Nicolino Sapio tells the story of one of these children of migrants, giving voice and memory to a historical and ethical scourge that marked the twentieth century: the plight of the children of Italian seasonal workers in Switzerland. The book breaks the silence on one of the most dramatic and forgotten chapters of Italian emigration: the story of the "invisible children" in twentieth-century Europe .

As the author himself writes in the novel's introductory note: "The scandal of the hidden children is a stain on the history of modern migration, a painful chapter that has seen too many children forced to live in inhumane conditions due to the wickedness of laws and cold economic calculations that saw immigrant childhood as a burden or a threat."

The Swiss writer Max Frisch famously quoted postwar immigration to Switzerland: "We called for arms, and men came." And those men and women had loved ones, families, desires, and needs that Sapio evokes through his narrative, taking us back more than half a century, to the summer of 1971, in the Calabrian village of Macchia. Here, young Nino spends his days playing by the river with his friends and tackling the mysteries of the adult world. When his father Franchino receives a seasonal contract in Zurich, his mother Giulianella refuses to separate the family and decides to follow him with her son.

A dramatic journey begins for little Nino: first hidden in the overhead locker of a train to evade border control in Chiasso, then locked inside a suitcase to cross the Zurich station, until he is forced into confinement in a sixteen-square-meter attic on Kleine Strasse. Forced to remain silent, to walk without creaking the wood, and never to look out of the window, without school or friends, immersed in the constant fear of being discovered and repatriated by the border police, Nino embodies the pure and wounded gaze of the so-called "children in the closet," those confined without ever having been directly convicted .

And Nicolino Sapio builds around her figure a fundamental novel about memory, the warmth of family affection, and the inalienable right of every child to have a name, a face, and a voice in the light of day.

A novel that doesn't aim to be a detailed denunciation of a country's policies, but rather a universal story because in every era, even now, in this moment, there are boys and girls forced by law to remain invisible, to live secluded and suspended between hope and fear.