“Taliban!” one woman shouted as Hamdy Mahisen walked past her on a Milan street.
“Shit, have you seen the ISIS?” asked another passer-by.
Mahisen, a student of Egyptian descent, walked around Milan as part of a “social experiment” conducted by Italian newspaper La Repubblica. Wearing a traditional Islamic outfit and holding a Quran, Mahisen silently strode around the Italian city for five hours as the reactions his presence elicited were surreptitiously filmed.
As the video above shows, Mahisen drew distrustful stares and nasty comments from people on the street.
“Look, he’s got the Quran,” said one man, according to a La Repubblica translation. “Think if he’s got a gun under his tunic.”
Anti-Muslim sentiment is reportedly on the rise in Italy following the deadly extremist attacks in France and Denmark. The country is also currently on edge over the threat of an ISIS invasion via Libya.
Earlier this week, Jewish journalist Zvika Klein was recorded walking through Paris for 10 hours wearing a kippah, or yarmulke, to show what it’s like to be a Jew in the French capital.
“I got spit at, cursed and threatened,” Klein wrote on Twitter of the experience.