Evicting Rome’s Undesirables - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 98

and the porta portese flea market.5 The camp was surrounded by abandoned in-
dustrial buildings and empty lots whose long-term purpose had remained unde-
cided for decades. Despite its proximity to the city center, the camp was hidden
from the view of local residents. Due largely to this invisibility, in the 1960s and
1970s, the street had hosted wooden or stone shacks built by a few dozen migrants
from southern and central italy. in the 1970s, a small number of Roma families
originally from bosnia also moved into the neighborhood,6 setting up homes
along the banks of the tiber and under ponte marconi. The imminent threat
of the river breaking its banks in the winter of 1985 forced the Christian Demo-
crat (Democrazia Cristiana) city government to intervene and, despite vociferous
protests from neighborhood residents, forty-four Roma families were given per-
mission to make their homes—some of them caravans provided by the protezione
civile —along vicolo savini. The area was delineated with a fence, marking the
beginning of an institutionalized separation between the Roma and the rest of
the neighborhood. The creation of this “nomad camp” reflected a broader trend
that was emerging throughout italian cities in the 1980s, whereby the only policy
envisaged for Roma was to accommodate them in camps, areas that were seg-
regated from the rest of the city and equipped with emergency facilities such as
chemical toilets and prefabricated huts.
in the following years, other Roma families who had settled in this area of
the city were evicted from their illegal encampments and moved to vicolo savini
by the authorities, causing a significant increase in the camp's population. at the
same time, the internal organization of the camp began to change: many of the
caravans were enlarged and reinforced and, in some cases, replaced with camper
vans or much more solid wooden structures which could accommodate the ever-
expanding families. other caravans instead started to fall apart and were patched
up with scrap materials such as plastic sheets and wooden planks. it was not
until 1995, ten years after its inauguration, that the city government did some
maintenance work, laying a new pavement and installing some showers and toilet
facilities. This new attention on the part of Rome's recently elected left-wing ad-
ministration also generated various social projects aimed at the camp's residents:
initiatives to encourage school attendance, employment integration, health edu-
cation, and disease prevention. however, various programs were carried out ex-
clusively within the camp and thereby reinforced the Roma's isolation from local
society by discouraging them from accessing public spaces and services in the
vicinity (see also Clough marinaro 2003 and Clough marinaro and Daniele 2011).
Nevertheless, some of the camp's inhabitants, particularly young Roma who had
been born or grew up within its confines, began to frequent the neighborhood
on a daily basis. The nearby bar, sports facilities along the riverbank, and shops
and stalls along Viale marconi all become places in which to interact and build
friendships with the italian and growing foreign population in the area.