Italy’s Roma forced eviction crisis demands EU action

For Roma, Italy’s so-called ‘Nomad Emergency’ never really ended, it just became invisible.

On the morning of April 22, at about 8:00, a handful of police officers and municipal waste management workers arrived under a concrete overpass on Rome’s east ring road to evict 15 Roma living in a makeshift settlement there. In a matter of hours, the impromptu structures, tents, mattresses, and camp-stoves were cleared away and the people were ordered to leave the noisy, dirty strip of wasteland they briefly called home. The eviction was one of five which took place across Italy that week, as part of the authorities’ regular clearances of improvised living places inhabited by Romani families who have nowhere else to go.