A solidarity emporium is not a simple warehouse where you can collect a package. It’s more like a small supermarket, complete with aisles and shelves, but where you don’t pay. To access it, however, it is not enough to just show up. The operators meet the family, try to understand how many people are in the house and how they are doing financially. From this conversation a sort of credit points is born, which is then spent on groceries.
The difference compared to the classic food parcel? It’s all in the cart. Nobody fills it for you. Each family goes through the shelves and chooses what they really need: more pasta or more detergent, for example. It’s not just a matter of distributing goods. The real point is not to take away people’s ability to decide. Anyone who has received an already packaged box at least once, with what others have chosen for them inside, knows well that this is no small detail.
And in Naples, this model is becoming increasingly necessary.
In Naples the queue is getting longer
In the city, Caritas manages seven solidarity stores and requests continue to rise. At the Gocce di Rugiada emporium, in Poggioreale, daily access would have gone from around twenty to fifty. The ones knocking are mainly Neapolitan families, including young people. The emporium collaborates with two supermarket chains in the area, which also sell products close to their expiry date. This helps those in difficulty and, at the same time, prevents food from ending up in the garbage.
Moving towards the eastern suburbs, between San Giovanni a Teduccio and Barra, there is the San Giuseppe Solidarity Emporium. Here the families followed on a stable basis are around 240, plus another 80 who arrive every now and then. In the last year the emporium distributed around 90 tonnes of food and 10 tonnes of household and personal hygiene products: in total, around 100 tonnes of goods. The requests? Increased by approximately 20%.
Drug stores aren’t the only answer. In 2026 the Prosolidar Foundation financed “Never hungry again“, a project for 100 families from Forcella and the Quartieri Spagnoli. With the Cesvi-Intesa Sanpaolo initiative, active from March to November, 4 thousand food parcels were financed for over 400 Neapolitan families: approximately half of which is destined for 200 families in Municipality 7.
In Italy there are 309, but the South is behind
Naples is not an isolated case. According to the Euricse report “Solidarity emporiums in Italy: beyond food distribution“, in May 2025 there were 309 active emporiums in our country. In 2021 there were 193. Over one hundred openings in four years, a growth that goes hand in hand with the increase in people and families in economic difficulty.
The map, however, is unbalanced. Approximately 48% of emporiums are located in the North, 29% in the Center and just 23% in the South, where more traditional tools such as food parcels and canteens still prevail. Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, alone, host over 48% of the emporiums surveyed.
More neighborhood outlets than supermarkets
The Euricse report also signals a less visible change. Many emporiums are becoming real points of reference for communities: in addition to pasta, milk, preserves and hygiene products, you can find after-school care, Italian courses, cultural activities, neighborhood dinners, helpdesk for orientation in the world of work, psychological support and initiatives against food waste.
Some even organize consumer education courses to help people think about what they put in their cart and distinguish the necessary from the superfluous. Material need remains the starting point. But networks are born around food that end up also dealing with health, school and work.
That a free supermarket also turns into an after-school club or a job help desk says a lot. The need, evidently, does not stop at the refrigerator. And with the high cost of living, everyday shopping has become a difficult item for many families to bear. The network of emporiums is holding up, and thank goodness. It remains to be seen how much further it will have to expand.
