Nomadic Romani
PERSONAL PROJECT
In the 1990s I spent a few days photographing a nomadic Romani extended family who were living in camps located just outside my home town of Cagliari, in the Italian island of Sardinia, along a major thoroughfare to the city’s main port.
I spent a week at the camp earning their trust and gaining unrestricted access to their extended family life. I discovered proud and surprisingly happy people, their family ties seemingly as solid as their unique cultural heritage. They shared a resolute will to belong and to please each other, the love for their children was strikingly manifest; they worked as a tight unit.
They survived, lived, and played together like any family in the first world, clearly visible from their camp.
Romani families lived in extreme poverty at the edge of the city and earned their living at the margins, through street begging and petty crime. Foreign-looking, largely illiterate and with poor command of Italian they were effectively barred from accessing any type of respectably paid job, however menial; their ethnicity itself a red line for local employers.
Romani children were regularly seen in the city centre begging for whatever cash they could secure by testing the kindness of passers-by.
The number of Roma registered to live in Italy today nears one hundred thousand. Narratives of race, immigration, nationhood, stereotypes, integration, and exclusion have become frontline topics in the local management of both legal and illegal mass immigration.
A quarter of a century later, the arrival and treatment of Roma nomads in Italy, along with the failed attempts by city councils to integrate them into Italian society, should serve as a blueprint for assured failure and a template to avoid.
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