Pope Leo XIV will visit the Italian island of Lampedusa on July 4, continuing a summer series of day trips in Italy. The trip echoes his predecessor Pope Francis’s first official journey outside Rome in 2013, when Francis traveled to the island to draw attention to the migrant crisis.The first American-born Pope will spend the U.S. Independence Day meeting with migrants, celebrating Mass, and visiting the graves of Africans who died attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
Lampedusa, part of Italy’s Sicily region, lies just 130 kilometers from Tunisia and remains one of Europe’s main entry points for people fleeing poverty and violence.When Pope Francis visited Lampedusa on July 8, 2013, the small island was seeing frequent arrivals of boats carrying hundreds of migrants and refugees from Africa.
During that visit, he celebrated Mass at an altar made from a migrant boat and threw a wreath of white and yellow flowers into the sea in memory of those who had perished. Referring to a recent shipwreck of an inflatable boat in the Strait of Sicily, Francis said at the time that he was saddened by a tragedy “that has been repeated so many times.” He added: “I felt I had to come here today to pray. To show my solidarity, but also to awaken our consciences, so that what happened never happens again. Please, let it never happen again.”
Months later, in October 2013, at least 300 people died when a boat carrying more than 500 migrants, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, sank off Lampedusa’s coast. That same year, a southern beach on the island was named the best beach in the world by TripAdvisor, underscoring Lampedusa’s dual identity as both a migrant landing point and a popular summer tourist destination.
Today, the island’s 6,000 permanent residents continue to receive tens of thousands of migrants each year who arrive on boats operated by human traffickers. Pope Leo strongly denounced those traffickers last month during a visit to another major European entry point, the island of Tenerife, Spain. “Come back while there is still time,” he said then, “because God’s mercy can reach even the most hardened sinner, but it only enters through the narrow gate of truth, justice, and conversion.”A day earlier, at the port of ArguineguĂn on Gran Canaria, the Pope addressed migration directly.
Human dignity, he said, “demands legal and safe pathways, rescue and assistance, genuine cooperation against traffickers, effective protection for victims, serious processes of reception and integration, and policies that allow every person to live with dignity in their own land.”While numbers are lower than during the peak of the migration crisis more than a decade ago, Lampedusa remains Italy’s main port of arrival for migrants.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, more than 49,500 refugees and migrants reached its shores in 2025.Pope Leo XIV will mark this reality on July 4 with a stop at the Gate of Europe memorial — a terracotta and iron arch nearly five meters high on the tip of Cavallo Bianco, a cliff facing south toward Tunisia, not far from the island’s commercial port. He will also lay flowers on the graves of shipwreck victims and address migrants at the Favaloro dock, which will be renamed in honor of Pope Francis.The morning will conclude with the celebration of Mass, attended by an image of the island’s patron saint, Our Lady of Portosalvo, or “safe harbor.”