Socio-cultural background of the Romani communities in Italy

The roma and the sinti people living in Italy are about 130.000, of whom about 70.000 are Italian citizens, while the remaining are mostly extra-communitarian citizens (first of all, from the ex Yugoslavia and Romania). Only a little minority of the roma people can be considered nomad, the others are sedentary (someone from decades).
According to a survey by the AIZO (Italian Association Gypsy Today), about the 50% of the roma people are less than fifteen years old and only the 1% are over sixty.

The roma people arrived in Italy with four migratory flows.
For what it concerns the first settlement, there is a main subdivision between the roma people, coming to our country by sea probably at the end of the XIV century from the Greek and Balkan coasts, and the sinti people, coming by land from the North at the beginning of the XV century.
The second migration was towards the middle of the XIX century, at the end of the slavery phase of the Danube countries.
The third migration consisted in the group that came after the First World War and settled in the North and in the centre of Italy.
The last migration concerned the roma people coming from the Balkan, arrived in Italy after the wars and the persecutions of the Nineties.
Nowadays, the roma people's migration concerns Romania and starts from Bulgaria.

In Italy, almost all of the roma people are sedentary. The present economic organization doesn't leave any space to the traditional jobs of the gypsy (blacksmith, smith…) nor to the activities that some of them undertook a few decades ago, as the refuse or rubbish collection and recycling.

The economical boom of the Sixties and the progressive globalization of the economy precluded the job insertion to the Italian roma people, in a more and more specialized and technological market. Thus, the roma people were reduced to live in stable settlements in the suburbs of the big cities, loosing their nomad practice that, even if it is not the core element of their culture, represents an important mean for the subsistence of these groups.

The roma people living in the camps authorised by the local administrations are the minority; the majority of the foreign roma people (in Italy from the end of the Eighties) has occupied the peripheral or abandoned areas at the margins of the big cities.

The prevailing way of roma settlement is the camp.
The regular camps are usually equipped with water, sewer system, electricity, and places for the caravans or the containers.
In Milan, there are seven municipal camps: five of them are occupied by Italian roma people, while two were set in 2001 for a group from Kosovo and Macedonia and a group from Romania.
On the whole, the structure of the Italian camps has a negative balance in terms of quality of life: the camps are often overcrowded, located in degraded areas of the suburbs, without territorial services, inhabited by people of different origins (factor easily trigging off conflicts between the various groups); moreover these camps are devised with criteria extraneous to the roma people destined to live in there.
Then, the poor infrastructures of the camps are often lacking in maintenance.
The camp model is more functional for a control logic by the part of the local administrations than for the needs of the people living there.

The majority of the foreign roma people living in urban areas gave rise to unauthorized settlement. The occupant groups count from 10 to 700 - 1.000 people; these areas are usually placed in outlying zones, lacking in basic services (water, sewer system, electricity), isolated from the network of public transport and periodically subject to clearing operations by the part of the police.

The roma groups living in Italy are very different the ones from the others; the thing they have in common is their condition of marginality, often originated from stereotypes and rooted prejudice. According to some surveys, it emerges that the roma people is the minority that enjoy less popularity in Italy (till open hostility and refuse).

In Italy, the Regions are concerned for the issues related to the roma people.
One of the most considered aspects is the living condition: almost all the laws are referred to the setting of equipped areas.
An analysis of these laws and of their enforcement points out a whole string of limits. First of all, the roma person is identified as the nomad, condition that - as already written - is not common; second, the municipalities have rarely followed the regional instructions: often they haven't even asked for the allocated funds.

In 1998, the roma people were excluded by the law about the protection of the linguistic minorities, although the European Chart of the minority regional languages indicates norms also for the languages without a specific territory.

Thus, the roma people sphere is characterized by the lack of legislation and a wide subjectivity in the law enforcement, condition that hits especially the foreigners.
The roma people, in fact, don't benefit of a special status by virtue of their ethnic belonging, but refer to the legislations of the various countries. Thus, the roma people of recent migration are assimilated to all the other immigrants and for this reason they have been expulsed, although they were escaping from wars and persecutions which concerned them as ethnic group.