Not far from Rome’s central train station stands an abandoned office building occupied by about seven hundred refugees, mostly from Somalia and Eritrea.

Aside from a large handwritten banner hanging from its windows that reads, “We are refugees, not terrorists,” the eight-floor structure looks like any other in the neighborhood, a business district dotted with international embassies and well-kept parks.

At the main entrance, a group of men unload a station wagon filled with sacks of white flour. They make a human chain, passing the bags from one person to the next, all the way to an elevator inside, and tell me the flour will be used to bake bread “our way.”