ITALY:Last Friday night "Sara" got off at the wrong train station. On the northern Rome suburban line to Viterbo, it is not a difficult mistake to make. The stations are not only dirty but ill-lit, while most of the station signs have been sprayed into illegibility by unknown spray-can "artists".
For 31-year-old Sara, a post-graduate political science student from Lesotho studying at Rome's La Sapienza university, this was bad news. As she walked home to Olgiata, further down the line, she was followed by Ian Rus, a 37-year-old unemployed Romanian immigrant.
The rest of the story makes for familiar and sadly inevitable reading. Rus pulled a knife on Sara, wounding her in the abdomen as he forcibly removed her clothes, before dragging her into a field close to the suburban station of La Storta.
He then raped her and might have left her for dead had not a police patrol, alerted by two passing motorists, come along within minutes to catch him in the act.
Rus is now in prison awaiting trial for rape, while Sara is recovering from her ordeal in hospital. Her very private trauma, however, has rekindled a bitter and very public debate about the role of immigrants in Italy.
The Sara incident revived memories of the murder of Giovanna Reggiani, a middle-aged teacher and the wife of an Italian navy officer who was attacked, raped and brutally beaten last November as she walked home from Tor di Quinto, another north Rome suburban train station.
On that occasion, too, the assailant was an unemployed Romanian, of "Rom" (gypsy) origin, 24-year-old Nicolae Mailat, who like Sara's attacker, lived in a nearby shanty town.
At any time, the Sara incident would have provoked public outcry. Given that it happened right on the eve of a highly symbolic Rome mayoral contest this weekend, it has become the dominant issue of a bitterly fought election.
Not for nothing did the centre-right candidate for mayor, former agriculture minister Gianni Alemanno, immediately accuse the ruling centre-left, saying: "This violent incident highlights once again the problem of the lack of security in the capital, a problem ignored by the centre-left."
Even if many foreigners, both resident and visiting, would perhaps agree with the centre-left candidate, former deputy prime minister and twice mayor of the city Francesco Rutelli, when he says that Rome is still "one of the safest cities in Europe", the politics of fear still seem to work in the Eternal City.
Many Italians and Romans alike have been alarmed over a perceived influx of Romanians in the wake of the country's membership of the European Union.
Even without the immigrant question this would have been a "hot" election. But coming just two weeks after Silvio Berlusconi's emphatic general election success, the Rome contest offers the centre-right the possibility of inflicting further humiliation on the centre-left, depriving them of a post they have held since 1993.
In the first round of voting two weeks ago, Mr Rutelli polled 45.8 per cent, while Mr Alemanno got 40.7 per cent. Even if that result clearly makes Mr Rutelli the favourite for this weekend's run-off, not everyone is sitting easy.
The threat of another electoral upset is such that centre-left foreign minister Massimo D'Alema said this week: "If the centre-right were to win here, it would be mortifying both for the city of Rome and for political life."
He did not need to add that it would also certainly be mortifying for the centre-left.
Such is the symbolic importance of this contest that the current affairs programme Ballaro staged a live TV debate between the two contenders this week. To some extent this made up for the Veltroni-Berlusconi debate that viewers did not get to see during the general election.
Not surprisingly, too, 60 minutes of the 70-minute head to head were dominated by two general election issues - immigration and the fate of ailing national carrier Alitalia.
While Mr Alemanno argued that the centre-left was incapable of guaranteeing a safe environment, Mr Rutelli counter-attacked by blaming the centre-right (and in particular its leader, Silvio Berlusconi) for the collapse of a much-touted plan to sell Alitalia to Air France-KLM.
Two weeks after the general election then, both the triumphant self-belief of the victorious right and the wounded pride of the defeated centre-left are on the line in this Rome election, a contest that looks more and more like a general election re-run.
Will this weekend's mayoral election be a case of winner take all might we see the loser's revenge?