The star of Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained and the ex-NBA champion had just been on a shopping trip and had their purchases, including a bag from Louis Vuitton, at their feet.
The image was innocuous but it sparked a row about prejudice and racism when Luca Bottura, an Italian journalist and radio presenter, posted it on Facebook and likened the celebrities to the waves of African migrants who have arrived in Italy over the past few years.
“Government funds at Forte dei Marmi…they go shopping at Prada with their daily allowance of 35 euros,” he wrote in a Facebook post, alongside the photo of Jackson and Johnson on the bench. “Share this if you are indignant!”
The Facebook post, which Mr Bottura insisted was ironic, was then picked up by a well-known model and singer, Nina Moric, attracting tens of thousands of comments, shares and likes.
She wrote: “To see migrants lounging around on benches in places like Forte dei Marmi, living off the 35 euros a day that they get from us, is really too much.” Ms Moric, who was born in what is now Croatia and supports a far-Right, anti-immigration movement called Casa Pound, insisted that her post was also a joke.
She said she would never have mistaken Jackson and Johnson for African migrants. But many people on Facebook took the image at face value, apparently convinced that the two men in the photo were indeed migrants who somehow had enough money to go designer shopping in one of the country’s smartest resorts.
“This is the Italy where we prefer to give 35 euros a day to Communist cooperatives in order to support layabouts rather than make them work and produce wealth,” one Italian man wrote. A woman called Roberta wrote: “Immigrants go home”, while another wrote: “Don’t tell me these people are fleeing from war, because I don’t believe it.”
Others pointed out, however, that the photo and accompanying words were “ironic” and “deliberately provocative”.
There is increasing exasperation in Italy over the huge numbers of economic migrants, many of them young West African men, who are rescued in the Mediterranean after being launched from the beaches of Libya by smuggling gangs. Last year, 181,000 were brought to Italy. The number so far this year is 98,000.
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Ms Moric, a former showgirl, said her Facebook post had been “a social experiment” and it had succeeded in exposing “how we really are in Italy”.“I want to clarify – it was an ironic joke,” she told Corriere della Sera newspaper. “I lived for 10 years between New York and Los Angeles and I recognised those two (Johnson and Jackson) immediately. I’m a citizen of the world who loves Italy, but not the way the country is governed.”
But her Facebook post – whether ironic or not – was criticised by some politicians, including Emanuele Fiano, an MP with the governing, centre-Left Democratic Party.
Describing Ms Moric as “an exponent of the neo-Fascist, extreme Right”, he accused her of an “obtuse ideology” which judged people on the colour of their skin. “I didn’t find it funny at all. There are plenty of people who think the same way that she does,” the MP said.
One of Hollywood’s most prolific and acclaimed actors, Samuel L Jackson has appeared in more than 100 films, from Shaft and Jackie Brown to Die Hard with a Vengeance and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Earvin “Magic” Johnson is regarded as one of the world’s greatest ever basketball players and spent his 13-year NBA career with the Los Angeles Lakers. He was a member of the US men’s basketball team, known as The Dream Team, that won a gold medal at the 1992 Olympics.
by Nick Squires
