Latinaਲਾਤੀਨਾ

Latina is a city of 127,450 people in the Lazio region of central Italy, capital of its own province on the reclaimed plain of the Agro Pontino, the old Pontine Marshes, about 62 kilometres south of Rome. For Punjabis it is the administrative heart of one of Italy's largest farm worker communities: Indians, most of them Sikhs from Punjab, have worked the fields around Latina since the mid-1980s, and published estimates put the province's Punjabi migrants at 13,000, with about 20,000 Sikhs described as working in the fields of Latina.

Where is Latina, and why do Punjabis live there?

Latina is one of the youngest cities in Italy. It was founded on 30 June 1932 as Littoria, under the fascist administration, when the swamp that had covered the Pontine plain since antiquity was drained, and it was inaugurated on 18 December of the same year, only 171 days after building began. Its first settlers came mainly from Friuli and Veneto, its centre was built in rationalist style around Piazza del Popolo, and in 1934 it became a provincial capital. After the Second World War it was renamed Latina in 1946, and it is now the second largest city in Lazio after Rome, an important centre for agriculture, with pharmaceutical and chemical industry and a strong service sector alongside the farming its province is known for.

Punjabis live in and around Latina because the drained Pontine plain is one of the largest fruit and vegetable districts in Europe, and its farms needed hands. From the mid-1980s, Indian workers, mainly Sikhs from Punjab, took up the harvesting of pumpkins, leeks, beans and tomatoes, work on the flower farms, and jobs in buffalo mozzarella production, the same dairy niche Punjabis filled in the north. The community spread across the province's farm towns, Sabaudia, Pontinia, Terracina, Fondi and Cisterna di Latina among them, while Latina city itself became its capital in every practical sense: the place its people march, organise and are counted from. Latina joins Reggio Emilia on this series' map of Punjabi places in Italy.

What do the numbers say?

Italy keeps no census of religion or ethnicity, so every figure for Sikhs in Italy is an estimate, and this page treats them that way. For Latina the estimates are provincial, not city level. An award winning investigation by Journalismfund Europe put the Punjabi migrant community of Latina province at 13,000 people, and described a community of 20,000 Sikhs working in the fields of Latina. Agence France-Presse, reporting from the city in 2024, described Latina as home to tens of thousands of Indian migrant workers. No sourced count for Latina city itself is published, so none is stated here. What the official figures do show is the city's own diversity: immigrants made up 11.5 per cent of Latina's population in 2025, and India stood among the five largest foreign countries of birth, alongside Romania, Ukraine, Bangladesh and Tunisia.

The Agro Pontino fields

The work that brought Punjabis to Latina is field work. The Agro Pontino, the Pontine Marshes drained in the 1930s, grows vegetables, fruit and flowers for markets across Europe, and its buffalo farms produce the milk for mozzarella. Indian workers have been part of that production since the mid-1980s, cycling and busing out from the province's towns to the farms at dawn. Sociologist Marco Omizzolo, himself from Latina, has spent years documenting the community, and his name runs through almost every serious account of Punjabi life in the province.

Exploitation, protest and organising

An honest page has to record the hard side of this story. Investigations and unions have documented a gangmaster system, called caporalato, in Italian agriculture: workers recruited through intermediaries, sometimes carrying heavy debts from the journey from Punjab, paid below legal rates and working very long days, with undocumented workers the most exposed. The community has answered in the open. In 2016, Omizzolo and 4,000 Sikhs marched through Latina, the provincial capital, to protest pay and conditions, and in 2018 another protest brought 1,500 Sikhs together with Italy's largest workers' unions. In June 2024, thousands of Indian farm labourers marched through Latina again after the death of Satnam Singh, a 31 year old worker without legal papers who died after a machinery injury, in a procession led by community figures including Gurmukh Singh, head of the Indian community in Lazio. Latina is where this community's grievances, and its organising strength, are most visible.

Gurdwaras and community life

The national gurdwara list records four temples in Latina province, all in the farm towns around the capital rather than in Latina city itself: Gurdwara Sri Sadh Sangat Sahib at Terracina on the coast, Gurdwara Singh Sabha at Fondi, Gurudwara Singh Saba at Sabaudia, and Gurudwara Sing Sabha at Cisterna di Latina, the town Latina's own municipality borders. Between them, and the community associations and shops of the province's towns, they carry the prayer, langar and mutual support of a workforce community that has put down roots over four decades: children born in the province, families reunited, and a second generation growing up between Punjab and the Pontine plain.

Latina is a city built on drained marshland in 1932, a provincial capital younger than some of its residents, and for Punjabis the capital of the Pontine farm belt: four decades of field work, a province wide community counted in the tens of thousands by its chroniclers, and a tradition of marching through this city's streets when the work turns deadly. For the full map, see Punjabi places in Italy.