Rome as a Global City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 41

of foreigners from western europe and the united states. This phenomenon can be explained
by the fact that two organizations which provide assistance and support to immigrants are
based there; the Comunità di s. egidio and the bangladesh Cultural institute of italy. many
immigrants declare the organizations as their official residence, a choice which is presumably
motivated by their lack of a stable place of residence in the city. based in part on direct con-
tact with these groups, i hypothesize that these people, who are mainly young men (only 18
of the 1,269 individuals resident there are women), in reality live in the neighborhoods where
their communities are particularly concentrated and in which there are frequent situations of
cohabitation and overcrowding in apartments. a walk through those neighborhoods is in any
case enough to note a large presence of bangladeshis, not least due to their businesses and the
numerous notices and publications in bengali.
12. Data provided by Caritas (2008, 2010), based on statistics collated by the Comune di
Roma.
13. and polish groups to a lesser extent (35.64 percent residing in the province).
14. on the basis of employment data, we can assume that these people work predominantly
in Rome (Caritas 2008).
15. Data on unauthorized settlements in 2008 were provided by arci-Karin. i use data
collected from diverse sources since—significantly—accurate official statistics on the Roma
population in Rome do not exist. This means that the data can only provide us with a partial
impression of the situation, which at most gives a very general sense of trends, rather than a
precise temporal and geographical mapping.
16. Declaration made by Rome's mayor, Gianni alemanno to Il Messaggero (23 april 2011)
17. These were counted during a health campaign to vaccinate Roma children. it was the
second edition of a project titled “health without exclusion: Campaign for access to health
and education services for Roma and sinti in Rome” ( Salute senza Esclusione: Campagna per
l'accessibilità dei servizi socio-sanitari e l'educazione della salute in favore dei Rom e Sinti pre-
senti a Roma ).
18. if we add these 4,179 residents to the approximately 7,900 which, according to data from
Caritas (2006, 2008), lived in “serviced or semi-serviced” camps recognized by the city author-
ities in 2006, the total population amounted to 12,079 people, far fewer than the approximately
20,000 Roma who the right-wing candidate for mayor, Gianni alemanno, suggested should be
expelled from the city (Vitale 2007).
19. an emblematic example is a camp in milan inhabited by about fifty italian Roma which
in 2009 was evicted fifty-two times in eight months (once every three days), only to be recre-
ated fifty-two times in the same place (senesi 2009). Despite the content of the Corriere della
Sera article that reported it, the box next to it referred to the Roma only as “the nomads.”
20. These regulations were recently declared illegitimate by italy's highest court for public
administration, the Council of state.
References
birindelli, massimo. 1978. Roma italiana: Come fare una capitale e disfare una città.
Rome: savelli.
Campani, Giovanna, francesco Carchedi, and alberto tassinari, eds. 1992.
L'immigrazione silenziosa. Le comunità cinesi in Italia. turin: fondazione
Giovanni agnelli.
Caritas di Roma. 2007. Osservatorio romano sulle migrazioni, III rapporto. Rome: ed-
izioni idos.