Over the past decade, Rome’s centre-left city governments have dedicated much of their political discourse to promoting the capital’s multiethnic status in positive terms. As the Italian city with the largest number of foreign residents, Rome has invested in promoting multicultural activities and attempting to involve migrants in policy-making as a key strategy for ensuring the long-term integration of minority communities. Within this context, the political treatment and persistent social exclusion of the city’s Roma/Gypsy population stands out in jarring contrast. While not the only groups to experience discrimination and ghettoization in Rome, the Roma are systematically targeted by exclusionary discourse and policy.
The paper briefly outlines the evolution in the city’s Roma population from the 1960s to the present, highlighting the diversity of these communities: their origins, economic status and social integration. In parallel, it draws on theories concerning multicultural societies to analyse the policy responses which have emerged to address the mounting visibility and ghettoization of these groups. The discussion culminates with an analysis of three events of 2007: Mayor Veltroni’s highly-publicized campaign to encourage Romanian Roma to ‘go back home’, a firebomb attack on the Ponte Mammolo ‘nomad camp’ by local residents, and the political responses to the murder of a middle-class Italian woman by a Rom. It concludes that recent alarmist reactions to increased arrivals of Roma migrants are a consequence of a long-term systematic failure by the city’s policy-makers to address Roma communities as a legitimate part of the multicultural city. Looking forward, it suggests that there is real potential for violent social conflict around the ‘problema zingari’ unless political responses change radically.