Every young woman at the Casa Regina Pacis has a worst memory. For some, it was the moment of realisation, in Romania or Serbia, that her identity and freedom had been confiscated, that her dream of escape to the West meant enslavement. The first rape by a new "owner" is a frequent nightmare; so are the auctions across eastern Europe where women are sold like cattle. The Albanians often beat their teenage "property" - and threaten to kill relatives if they try to escape or betray their tormentors.
The story usually starts in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, the poorest country in Europe. Anna, a tall, black-haired young woman with green cat eyes and plucked eyebrows, was 17 years old when her mother Svetlana died of heart disease in 1997.
"My father started drinking," Anna says. She is a cheerful soul, but her voice cracks when she talks about her family. Her father Valeri had been a soldier in the Soviet army, and his job took the family to every corner of the former eastern bloc. Grief and inactivity led him to vodka. "For four years we couldn't pay the rent or bills. My father's pension was enough to buy food - nothing else," she says.
Anna fetches an album of family snapshots. These fragments of lost innocence are the girl's most precious belonging, constantly studied and shared with the other women she now lives with. Anna opens the book to her favourite page, with two black-and-white photos. One shows her father, still young, with high Slavic cheekbones. "The day I left, he wept and said: `Maybe you shouldn't go.' He worried the way all fathers do," she says. The other picture, lovingly trimmed into a silhouette along the outline of her parents' heads and shoulders, shows Valeri and Svetlana before she died: a handsome couple, tough, long-suffering former Soviet citizens.
For three years after leaving school, Anna tried to find work in Chisinau. As a child, she had dreamed of being a doctor. "But the problem was always money," she says, spitting the word out. "Money, money, money . . . Life is too hard in Moldova. There is no work. Even if you have a job, there is no money to pay your salary. If you work in a shoe factory, they pay you with shoes."
Several of Anna's schoolmates decided to leave Moldova for Italy. "I never heard from them," she says. "I was willing to do any kind of work, but I had no idea what was in store for me." Then, in May of last year, an acquaintance in Chisinau gave Anna the address of a Moldovan woman in Timisoara, Romania. "When I arrived, there were a dozen girls in that apartment, most of them Moldovan, a few Ukrainian. We were locked up; they took my passport," she says. "The other girls said: `What did you think was going to happen? It's just a job - you'll sell yourself when you get to Italy and you'll make money.' I had trusted the woman in Chisinau. Nobody there said anything about prostitution; they talked about working in a bar or a restaurant."
This modern slave trade has exploded in the two years since the Kosovo war, with an estimated 120,000 east European women reaching the west European "market". Yet the EU has so far proved incapable of taking a concerted humanitarian approach to the problem. France and Britain regard the young women as illegal immigrants and criminals rather than victims. In a memorandum presented in Paris on April 2nd, a rapporteur for the 43-member Council of Europe noted that member-states "have a hard time distinguishing between prostitution and trafficking" and that "certain members noted that most of the women who engage in prostitution do it for financial reasons".
Don Cesare Lodeserto is the balding, bespectacled bear of an Italian priest who founded the Casa Regina Pacis. This 40year-old veteran of missions in Rwanda, Madagascar and Brazil has quietly, and without preaching liberation theology, established what a local politician privately calls "the only left-wing reception centre in Italy". Don Cesare's native Puglia region - "the heel of the boot" - is conservative, and his disregard for immigration laws and love for the downtrodden seem revolutionary here. "The poor do a great thing - the poor are our salvation," he tells me.
By his own count, Don Cesare saved 650 Moldovan and Ukrainian women from the Albanian mafia last year. "I have spoken to Albanian traffickers," he explains. "They say: `I bought this woman. She's my property.' An Albanian policeman told me he had two jobs - as a policeman, and buying women to send to Italy as an investment. The Albanian government built a centre at Shkoder to help these women, and the police started selling them."
Don Cesare is angered by those who suggest the young women choose their fate. "We must throw off the image of the consenting, mercenary girl," he says. "Any form of slavery is vile. Most of them leave home without knowing. Some know - but knowing doesn't mean wanting. There is such a thing as deliberate prostitution, but not for the girls from the East."
The priest set up the Casa Regina Pacis as a reception centre for illegal immigrants four years ago. Today, 200 refugees of 54 nationalities live under his supervision. Appalled by the number of Moldovan and Ukrainian girls who began arriving in 1999, Don Cesare built a special walled annex for them. In the West, the fall of the Soviet Union and the 1999 Kosovo war were hailed as triumphs, but Don Cesare sees the bitter aftermath of these events daily. "Puglia is the border with eastern Europe," he says. Across the Straits of Otranto, only 44 nautical miles separate Italy from Albania. The 60 women now living in the refuge crossed these waters at the end of a forced trek through Romania, Serbia, Montenegro and Albania. The journey usually takes betwen one and three months, most of it spent in Albania before the final leap to the West. Although the women were forced to "service" slave-traders and clients en route, they received no payment. When you encounter the youngest of them in the sewing workshop or a bungalow, they look like fragile children, unsmiling Dresden dolls who will shatter if spoken to. Don Cesare finds employment for these girls, caring for the elderly or working as babysitters or interpreters (Anna now works in a pastry shop). He never turns anyone away, and there is no limit on their stay. Most return home or start a new life after about one year.
The eldest look much harder; many of them became prostitutes to save their children back in Moldova. Those in between, like 21-year-old Anna, are more talkative. Anna says she has lost the ability to trust anyone, but there is something touching in the way she and her friends, Anka and Irina, offer us tea and insist on cleaning their rooms before letting us enter.
Anka was a grocery store cashier in the Ukraine. Both her father and husband took to vodka, "like most men in Ukraine", she says. "The money earned was not for the family, but for vodka." So Anka saved $600 to buy a French visa in the hope of giving a better life to her son.
IRINA is 18 years old. Sitting beneath a Britney Spears poster, with her wire-rimmed glasses, short brown hair and cross eyes, she looks like a secondary school student. Irina ran away from home in Chisinau when she learned she was pregnant by her boyfriend, Igor. "I was sold eight times in three months in Albania," Irina says, her hands trembling. "I thought I was going to die there."
For the first half of her captivity, Irina was protected by four older Moldovan women who were sold with her. "I was very nervous. I didn't eat and I cried all the time," she says. "When the boss told me to go with a man, one of the others would say: `She's too young; I'll go in her place.' I don't know where those four girls are now, maybe still in Albania. I think about them all the time." Despite the beatings Irina endured, her son Eugenio was born healthy last July, one of three babies now living at the Casa Regina Pacis.
Don Cesare had told me that his greatest joy was "becoming a `papa' 32 times". He praises "my Moldovan ladies" who had the courage to give birth to children conceived in rape or prostitution. About 20 little boys have been named Cesare after him, and at least one Moldovan girl is called Caesaria. Members of a Moldovan television crew invited to San Foca (in the hope that they would spread the word about what happens to girls who naively head west) joke that Don Cesare will soon be elected president of Moldova. In addition to Regina Pacis, he runs a safe house in northern Italy for young women threatened by the Albanian mafia, and safe houses in Moldova and Ukraine to help girls who choose to go home.
Don Cesare says he relies on providence to supply the Casa Regina Pacis' 10 billion lira annual budget. Providence takes the form of private donors, the Italian government, the Vatican and the Italian Bishops' Conference.
While I talk with Anna and Anka, a slightly older woman with a hard face hangs laundry outside. She wears a backless top and has a prominent scar, composed of three parallel red stripes, across her back. "Gigi", the kind police inspector who works with Don Cesare, recalled a young woman whose entire body was covered with cigarette burns. The barbarity of Albanian traffickers is legendary: everyone here has heard of "owners" who terrify rebellious women into submission by showing them severed arms or legs, or driving a car over a troublesome girl as an example.
From Romania, Anna followed the well-worn path to Belgrade and the Montenegran capital, Podgorica, where she was sold to Zef, "a short Albanian with a disgusting red face". Before taking her and another young Moldovan woman with him, Zef checked that they had no scars on their bodies. The three drove into the mountains, then walked for half an hour to a car waiting inside Albania. The women were locked in an apartment for the fourth time. The other girl was taken away by a Russian-speaking Albanian woman.
"Albanian women no longer become prostitutes," Don Cesare told me. "They are the new bosses of the sex trade. More and more, women are the exploiters."
Another Albanian named Victor purchased Anna for 3,000 deutschmarks (£1,208). "I was with him for two weeks," she recalls. "He said he was 24 years old. He was ugly, with long hair." She shivers as she describes him.
Other immigrants wash up on the Puglia coast in overcrowded, rusting freighters, but the Albanian mafia dispatch their sex slaves in little speedboats known as scafi.
"One night, Victor said he would bring over the scafista who was taking us to Italy," Anna continues. "Victor went into the kitchen to make coffee and the scafista said to me: `You don't know anyone in Italy. I'll give you my phone number. I'll help you.' When he left, I didn't say anything to Victor. He found the phone number in my wallet and he beat me, yelling: `I paid for you and you were going to go with him.' " Anna's lower lip split and bled profusely. "If you try to escape and you go to the [Albanian] police, they'll sell you again," he told her.
"Then he showed me two bullets," Anna says. "And he said: `I'll find my pistol and I'll use these to kill you.' "
The photo album still sits on the table between us. Anna gently pulls the silhouette of Valeri and Svetlana from its plastic pocket. "I took this photo of my mother and put it next to my heart, because I thought I was going to die," she says.
"Victor demanded to know why, and I told him: `So my mother will see what you do to me.' He hit his own head against the wall; he was crazy. He said: `I was going to keep you. You were going to work the street for me. Why did you take that phone number?' "
Anna climbed out of the scafo on the beach at Otranto a few nights later. "I was so happy to see the guardia di finanza waiting for us," she says. Victor was taken to prison, she to the Casa Regina Pacis, where she told her story to Don Cesare and the carabinieri. That was in June 2000. Six months later, Anna testified against her former "owner" at the tribunal in Lecce.
"When we were still in Albania, Victor told me he would have my whole family killed if I did that. He had their names and addresses. I'm afraid of this still. I don't know how long he will be in prison," Anna says.
Cataldo Motta, the deputy prosecutor in Lecce, who is heading a new task force against the Albanian mafia, says seven years is the longest any sex trafficker spends in an Italian prison. About 100 young women denounced their "owners" last year - tremendous progress, says Motta. In exchange, the women are given Italian residence papers. "We arrested about 250 scafisti, but that doesn't take us very far," he says. "The girls are often accompanied by their `bosses', so their help is essential. The relationship with a priest is different from a policeman or judge. That's why Don Cesare's help has been so important."
Motta describes the Albanian mafia as "very dangerous and very intelligent". When the big waves of illegal immigration started in the late 1990s, "they became the managers, a sort of agency for Albanians, Kurds, Egyptians, Chinese, Pakistanis, Afghans . . .Then their role changed. They continued to traffic illegal aliens, but they expanded into drugs, weapons and prostitution. Today in Italy, Albanians have almost exclusive control over the prostitution of east European girls. They annihilated the Calabrese Ndrangheta, who ran prostitution in Lombardy and the Piedmont."
But sometimes the mafiosi co-operate, as shown by the arrest in Italy this week of 105 men from Albania, the N`drangheta and the Sicilian Camorra. The suspects are accused of working together in the sex slave trade.
Don Cesare is protected by eight bodyguards at the Casa Regina Pacis, and by three during his forays outside. When he goes on walks to meditate, the priest asks his escorts to keep their distance. One evening this winter, two Albanians approached Don Cesare in the woods near the centre, and ordered him at gunpoint to go with them. "They said I had to `restore the property of the Albanians'. They wanted a girl who had sent 17 Albanians to prison. The carabinieri sealed off the area and three hours later they freed me," he says.
It is late afternoon as I accompany Don Cesare around his small kingdom in the Casa Regina Pacis. In the illegal immigrants' quarter, Kurdish, Arab and African men rise as he passes. "Don Cesare, we've missed you. Where have you been?" one shouts.
Outside, a Romanian girl with black hair and blue eyes, baggy jeans and a Walkman, sits crying on a bench. "Christina, what's the matter?" Don Cesare asks tenderly. Christina is to leave the following day to visit her family in Bucharest (Don Cesare pays for each young woman to visit her family once a year). "I'm afraid my fiance will forget me," the Romanian girl cries. "Don't worry," Don Cesare chides. "We'll find another when you come back."
Don Cesare never talks to the refugees and former prostitutes about religion. A tiny cross at the neck of his jumper is the only sign of his vocation, and there are no religious symbols or chapel at Regina Pacis. But the parallel with Mary Magdalene is blatant.
"The Gospel says the prostitute will precede you to heaven," Don Cesare tells me. "So I cast my lot with them, because I want to arrive just behind them."
Don Cesare Lodeserto can be reached by e-mail at donce@tiscalinet.it. Website: www.reginapacis.org