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Stand at any big port here in Sicily and almost every day you'll see a rescue ship or a big commercial vessel docking carrying on board hundreds of migrants who've been rescued at sea.

In the first five and a half months of this year more than 50,000 people were picked

up as they tried to cross the Mediterranean to reach Italy's southern shores and in the same period more than 1800 others drowned.

I'm Emma Jane Kirby and over the past few months I've spent a lot of time in Sicily

telling the often terrible stories of those who've made the dangerous crossing.

But how are ordinary Italians affected by this flood of migrants arriving on

their shores? After all, someone has to be cooking for the migrants, comforting them and caring for them. So in this program I'm going to be

telling the stories of five Italians whose lives have been dramatically changed by this wave of migration.

Mm-ma-my-Maget.

Here in Patania on Sicily's eastern coast, in a few moments we'll be visiting a migrant soup kitchen

to talk to the extraordinarily energetic and endearing housewife

who's now volunteering as head chef.

Thank you.

Then we'll be heading to Catania's main hospital to meet the man who organises medical care

for all the sick and injured migrants who are rescued off the coast.

And in the second half of our program, we'll be on Italy's southernmost island, the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where a couple of years ago the migrants outnumbered the native population.

There we'll meet the island's optician who found himself at the scene of a traumatic shipwreck while on a sailing holiday.

He'll tell us how he tried to rescue scores of drowning men.

And will be introduced to the gruff gravedigger of Lampedusa,

whose job it is to bury those unidentified migrants who don't survive the crossing.

...