FEW politicians have had as horrid an introduction to public life as Cécile Kyenge, who was awarded the racial integration portfolio in Enrico Letta’s left-right coalition in April. The latest in a barrage of insults came in a Facebook posting from Cristiano Za Garibaldi, the deputy mayor of Diano Marina, a small town on the Italian Riviera. He implied that Ms Kyenge, an eye doctor, frequented an area used by prostitutes. On August 25th he apologised, blaming “stress”.

Other abuse has come from more senior politicians. In July a leading member of the Northern League, Roberto Calderoli, a former cabinet minister and current deputy Speaker of the Senate, said Ms Kyenge reminded him of an “orang-utan”. The party’s founder, Umberto Bossi, denied it was racist but said Ms Kyenge had “pissed people off”.

The grounds for that irritation are a matter of debate. The minister had issued a statement at the start of the new football season, expressing the hope that it would be free of the racist chanting that has dogged such black players as the AC Milan (and Italy) striker, Mario Balotelli. The comments on the website of Corriere della Sera, Italy’s biggest-selling daily, were overwhelmingly negative. “No Congolese immigrant is going to tell me how to behave in my own home or pass laws that destroy my country,” was one of the milder ones.

Ms Kyenge has stayed calm, But she has expressed concern for the safety of her two daughters. After the Northern League’s leader, Roberto Maroni, had ignored her suggestion that he should condemn the insults his members fling at her, she pulled out of a debate at a League festival.

The League is determined to block Ms Kyenge’s priority: to make citizenship dependent on birth, not blood ties to Italy. That would make it easier for the children of immigrants to acquire citizenship. The League’s erstwhile ally in government, the PdL, now part of Mr Letta’s coalition, is likely to support it.

The row has exposed the hollowness of the League’s claim that it is not xenophobic, only against illegal immigrants. It would be hard to find a shinier success story than Ms Kyenge’s. She entered Italy legally in 1983 to study medicine (though she lived illegally in the country for about a year after a university scholarship she had been led to expect failed to materialise). In 1994, she married an Italian engineer and became a citizen.

The shameful treatment of the country’s first black minister, and the limited condemnation of it, not only hurts Italy’s image. It also jars with Italians’ widespread belief that they are free of racism. Using data from 2005-07, the World Values Survey found 11.1% of Italians saying they did not want neighbours of a different race, against 4.9% in Britain. Even among Spaniards, who have had a similar experience of rapid, recent and largely unauthorised immigration, the proportion was 6.9%. Ms Kyenge has a tough job ahead of her, in every sense.