“We’re living a big crisis,” the Rev. Elvis Ragusa, 36, said, sitting in an office next to his small church.

As a child, he watched an Italian television series called “Europe Is Us.” There was also a game show that offered up to 1 million lira to the first person to call in and shout “Europa, Europa!” live on air.

It was the 1990s and Europe meant prosperity. “I grew up with that idea that Europe was our future,” Father Ragusa recalled.

But for a new generation, Europe has become synonymous with austerity and the perils of open borders.

Father Ragusa’s town had voted for the left for seven decades. But three years ago, it became the first Tuscan town to switch allegiance to the hard-right, anti-immigrant League party of Matteo Salvini, Europe’s most flamboyant populist leader.

The priest took a small plastic globe off his bookshelf and spun it to show a flagrantly outsized Italian boot protruding from Europe. This is how Italians like to think of Italy today, he said.

Nationalism is winning. “It could be very dangerous,” he said.

His words came back to me in Arezzo, Italy, where an engineer recalled his shock when his 16-year-old daughter gave the thumbs up after she heard on the news that a hundred migrants had drowned.