In Palermo’s bustling Ballarò district, hollering sellers stack market stalls high with blood oranges, almonds and towers of pitta bread, their guttural wails mingling with the smells of boiled meats and sizzling chickpea fritters that fill the air. The dusty streets throb with customers from every corner of the globe.

For Shapoor Safari – a softly-spoken ex-army commander who fled his native Afghanistan in 1996 after a period fighting the Taliban during their first military campaign – the buzzy neighbourhood feels like home. “Palermo is different from other cities in Europe,” he says. “Here everything is special. I have never felt alienated in this city.”

As head chef of the Moltivolti restaurant in Ballarò, Safari is a local celebrity – 3,000 visitors descend on the restaurant every month to sample delicacies prepared by the Afghan and his team of cooks from Senegal, Morocco, Italy and Gambia. Dishes made with ingredients sourced from the market include Afghan beef curry, West African peanut stew and moussaka.

Moltivolti is no ordinary restaurant. Its premises also hosts co-working facilities for third-sector organisations, including Greenpeace and a local anti-racism association, as well as an in-house NGO promoting intercultural dialogue. Staff frequently ask customers to back its most ambitious initiatives financially, forming a powerful model for social change.

When the Taliban swept back to power in Afghanistan in August, Safari’s loved ones in Kabul were imperilled. Many of them went into hiding while the team from Moltivolti plotted their escape to Palermo. “I felt a happiness I cannot express in words,” Safari says, recalling the moment they arrived. “I just thank god that my family was saved from the clutches of the terrorists.”

Palermo has a history of welcoming newcomers. The city’s architectural patchwork of Moorish domes, sweeping Norman arches, richly decorated Spanish baroque facades and dazzling Byzantine mosaics are a testament to centuries of sociocultural and ethnic mixing. Churches have been turned into mosques and towering murals glorify migrants past and present. With residents from 127 countries, the city is Italy’s most ethnically diverse today.

In recent years Leoluca Orlando, the city’s veteran mayor, has transformed Palermo from a Mafia stronghold into a beacon for migrants’ rights. He has offered new settlers “honorary citizenship” and, in 2018, famously ignored government orders to close all of Italy’s ports to rescue boats. Most of the 67,000 migrants that reached Italy by boat last year first set foot on Sicilian soil. Palermo, the region’s capital, is the city of “hospitality”, as Orlando never tires of declaring.

Moltivolti is a case in point. Chattering asylum seekers and professors from the nearby university law department tuck into seafood couscous and Ethiopian zhìginis. Speakers animatedly discuss what more Palermo can do to integrate migrants. “Our dishes merge influences from around the world,” says Claudio Arestivo, co-founder of Moltivolti, who employs 31 staff from 10 countries. “There is no better metaphor for the intercultural mixing we aim to promote.”

The restaurant’s customers are key to its ability to deliver action. From 2017, Italy prosecuted NGO staff who had rescued migrants in the Mediterranean. The following year, the restaurant and five other companies founded the Mediterranea, an organisation that scours the sea for drowning migrants.

When the Taliban returned, Moltivolti’s staff stepped up to the plate again. Hedayatullah Habib Mansoor, Safari’s nephew, had been working as a prominent journalist and blogger, combatting government corruption, reporting on anti-terrorism efforts and promoting women’s rights. When Mansoor criticised the new Taliban government, he ended up on its wanted list.

“We went into hiding for three months,” says Mansoor, who also feared for the safety of his wife and two children, now five and six. “At one point, we had to change locations every day.”

The restaurant raised €10,000 in just 11 days, helping cover the family’s costs. Meanwhile, staff mobilised a network of politicians, including Orlando, who activated diplomatic efforts to secure the family Italian visas.

Eventually, after the family escaped overland to Pakistan, 10 of Safari’s relatives, including six women and Mansoor’s children, were granted visas and flown to Palermo, where they were greeted by Safari, the mayor and Moltivolti staff. “They welcomed us like we were family,” Mansoor said.

On his first walk around Palermo, Mansoor, like his uncle, was astonished by the similarities between the Sicilian capital and Kabul. “We looked at the surrounding mountains and thought ‘they are just like our mountains’. We thought ‘the warm gazes of the people are just like those of our people’.”

Disaster struck again at the end of January, when the restaurant burned down after an electrical failure. For Mansoor, who was living with nine other relatives in the cook’s one-bedroom flat, the news was “heart-breaking”.

But Palermo’s generosity did not wane. In early March, the Italian Union of Buddhists announced it would help secure seven of Safari’s relatives an apartment in Palermo. Meanwhile, Mansoor was determined to get Moltivolti back on its feet. The efforts and a crowd-funding campaign has paid off – on Sunday, Moltivolti will reopen with a huge street party.