The gypsy crisis in Italy: the district of Ponticelli following the fire

"We sent them away"

When we asked Gianni for directions to Virginia Woolf street, he told us “If you are looking for the gypsies, you won’t find anything. We sent them away. We burnt everything after they fled”. The national newspapers hardly said anything about the fire in May. How one by one, children, men, the elderly and women were taken, thrown out of their homes and forced to flee. Some only went a few metres hoping that the fury of the Italians would calm down. What they saw, however, was how they returned by night to burn everything which had not been destroyed in the middle of the day. From their “kampina” (as the gypsies usually call their camps) below the bridge on the A3 motorway from Naples to Salerno you can see signs of the fire that was provoked last year on 13 October. “We want them all sent away. All of them. We no longer want them here. By force. ‘out, out’, they shout. They have turned on me and call me “child thief”. They used to call my father this as well, but stopped. In Naples all was well”. Everything was fine in Naples he repeated several times. “We were fine until a gypsy girl was accused of trying ‘to steal’ a child. After this event happened in Ponticelli on 10 May last year, the intolerance of the population towards the nomads, who used to living on the outskirts, became more and more violent, and what is more they were backed by the popular propaganda and racism of the party that forms part of the government.

Security measures: proceedings and evictions

As a consequence of what happened during the previous spring the police brought to a head imprisonments, evictions and record keeping in all of the peninsular territory from Milan to Foggia and from Naples to Rome. This was the result of decrees and initiatives approved by administrative bodies that was said to meet with popular approval. Nico held his daughter Sara (Sara is the name of the mythic patron saint of the Roma people) in his arms while she told us about her life during the previous half year. “They want to take our children’s fingerprints, but, for what reason? They are children who live with us. We all live in the same way. We do not take advantage of our children”. Sara turned one hand towards the other with the palms upwards in the gesture that gypsies use. Although she is only one year-old she already knows how to beg for money. She receives a small coin but leaves it on the table indicating that in its place that she wants the biro. “We live on charity. If we could work, if somebody would offer us work, we would not beg for money. It is only because we have to ask that we perhaps do it in such a manner, this is how gypsy life is. It is how my grandfather grew up, and my great grandfather, and my father My children too are growing up in the same way. To put out your hand to ask for help is not stealing. To live amongst rats, without toilets and with ticks behind you all the time is no fun. What do you see now? Do you see a rich person who is enjoying begging?”

“Beggar” is what the Neapolitans call us. Nico knows just how well the people say that gypsies are people who pretend to be poor but in fact possess great riches. “We are those who have money. We are delinquents, now that there are so many in Naples. Even the thieves call us ‘gypsies’. How many, I don’t know but I know that often we don’t have anything to eat, that I cannot wash myself, that I am beaten, that people look at me callously and look at my wife and my children as if they were convicts. If Anna goes out begging for money and it gets late, I go out looking for her thinking “where is she, have they kept her because she is young and they think she is being exploited, and have they taken my children”, he continues.

Before entering the gypsy camp, Anna and her daughter take off their shoes, Julia puts money in front of “dad” (daddy in Romany), and leaves the croissants that they have not sold on a chair. Then he smiles. Nico gets up to see what is happening outside. “Another six are setting off”, in an ‘Ape Piaggio’” (a three-wheeled light commercial vehicle typical of Italy). It goes across the main road that leads to the centre loaded with parcels and people. “They are returning to Romania. They take a cheap bus”. The coaches are run by the company Atlassib, which operates throughout a fair part of Europe, with its destination in Bucharest. In Italy, each night at 22.30, one leaves from Tarento that crosses the whole of the peninsula and sets down dozens of unhappy gypsies in Hungary and Romania. “I have not returned to Constanta, a Romanian city on the border of the Black Sea. I don’t have the money to pay for four tickets, and I don’t want to either. Berlusconi should not send us to Romania, he should take the Italians in Romania who are thieves and stretch out their hands like this”, he says pointing his fingers, putting his index finger in front of his thumb, imitating a pistol, ‘Bang!’

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