An exhibition of art from India was being installed at Rome’s Luigi Pigorini Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography. Beyond the mah-jongg, Chinese music and Andean ritual dancing displays, Putli Ganju; Juliette Fatima Imam; and Juliette’s mother, Philomina Tirkey Imam, were hanging their paintings of animals and fish. “You’re not my type,” the elder Ms. Imam said. She was explaining the meaning behind her work of a bird turning away from a deer. Ms. Ganju’s scene of jungle life, next to it, was more elaborate, with curlicues and filigree.

“We’re from different tribes,” Ms. Imam said, “and in her case everything is mixed up, and in mine everything is separate.” Europe, for all its diversity, can be remarkably provincial. The latest Italian government came to power a few months ago promising to crack down on illegal foreigners, who immigration opponents here say are associated with crime. More than a third of all prisoners in Italy are foreigners. Foreigners are charged with 68 percent of rapes, 32 percent of thefts. The far right wing of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s new government has proposed anti-immigration laws, provoking heated opposition from human-rights organizations, the Vatican, the United Nations. But with plummeting birth rates and an aging populace, Italy can hardly survive without foreign labourers. Albanians and Romanians care for the elderly. Indians working in Emilia-Romagna tend the cows producing the milk for Parmesan cheese.

Fears about crime by immigrants, inflamed by the news media and populist politicians, have combined with one of the largest waves of foreigners in Europe. The Northern League joined Berlusconi’s government after distributing posters showing an American Indian next to a warning that Italians will end up, as they did, penned into reservations if immigration doesn’t stop. Italy is going through the sort of culture shock the United States experienced a century ago, when millions of Italians, among others, immigrated to America. By 2006, 640,000 new immigrants were legalized here, as part of the largest one-time legalization in the history of Europe.

Rome is naturally more integrated than most Italian cities and in recent years has taken steps to come to terms with its multicultural reality, including instituting a public library programme to reach immigrants and provide Romans with books and lectures about foreign cultures. “We always thought of ourselves as a monoculture, but immigration is our present and future,” said Franco Pittau, of Caritas, a Roman Catholic social service that monitors immigration.

Franca Eckert Coen, an Italian Jew in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic city, who worked with Rome’s mayor on immigrants, recalled a year when Chinese celebrated their New Year with dragons around the Day of Epiphany.

“The newspapers said the Chinese were against Christianity. We held a public event about Chinese culture and the New Year celebration, and now we have a Chinese parade each year. It was the same with the Sikhs. Little things,” she called them, “can overcome big fears. I saw all these immigrants become a little bit Italian citizens. Cultural diversity is always positive” Italian culture certainly isn’t diverse now. It subsists on an all-white, all-native, mono-ethnic diet of Italian game shows, Italian television mini-series, Italian advertisements on cable stations for improbable vibrating contraptions that promise to jiggle fat away, and Italian pop music.

Gabriella Sanna directs a multicultural library programme here. It collected Italian translations of world fiction and other foreign books. Then, as the immigrant population boomed, it bought books in Romanian, Polish, Arabic, French, English, Spanish, Chinese. Some 8 percent of foreigners, Sanna estimated, now use the public libraries in Rome.

But asked about the recent election and whether her programme would survive, Sanna’s dour expression suggested she wasn’t optimistic. Across town, at the Indian art show, the museum was empty. It is splendid but under-financed and under-appreciated. Roman schoolchildren are dragged there on class trips –never to return. Their parents look like guilty relatives reminded of a kindly aunt they haven’t checked on in years.

Ms. Imam’s daughter, in her 20s, the most Westernized of the three Indian women, hearing her two elder colleagues describe their pictures, said her painting suggested a melting pot. It was full of shapes and figures. At the centre were two birds, entwined. “In India, we say if you see two birds together, it is good luck.”