"Nomad camps" were part of a deliberate housing policy that Italy adopted, not a housing style typical of the Roma’s allegedly "nomadic culture." Nomad camps are places of segregation. Starting in the 1970s, the fact that Gypsy groups were compelled to accept only one type of settlement — "nomad camps" — has not only had a serious impact on the quality of their lives, but also on their relationship with the urban societies in which they happened to live.
Via Novara 523. Storie di padri e madri rom ["523, via Novara. Stories of Roma fathers and mothers"], Italy, 2010
The documentary was directed by Gaetano Maffia, who filmed inside the municipal nomad camp at via Novara in Milan, supervised by Caritas Ambrosiana, the local Church’s humanitarian organization. The narrator (an actress playing one of the camp’s teenage Roma dwellers) takes viewers on a journey into the migration experiences, the daily lives, the plans and expectations of some of the Kosovar and Macedonian Roma living there.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Campososta - Rome (Italy)
Stefano Liberti , Enrico Parenti. Produced by ZaLab with the support of Open Society Foundation (2013 , 8). A furnished camp in Via Roma is a regular Roma camp, the largest one in Europe. Inside there are about 1200 people of various Roma origins ( Romanians, Serbs , Montenegrins, Bosnians). The camp is located outside of the Grande Raccordo Anulare [Eng: "Great Ring Junction"], is not connected by public transport and has no communal space . The families in containers; the distance between the containers is about two meters. Children go to school in the morning, located far away, driven by service vans. Given the distances involved and the morning traffic, they arrive in school almost always at least an hour late.
Inside the camp tensions are high. The groups do not communicate with each other, the level of education is very low, and unemployment is very high. The mini- doc follows the everyday life of the camp: the children who go to school; teens who spend their days doing nothing (many, though born in Italy, do not have the nationality of origin, having lost their national origin as a result of desintegration of the former Yugoslavia); adults, men and women, trying to make ends meet with random jobs. The "camp stop" Via di Salone is the emblem of the policy of segregation of ethnic Roma operated by municipalities of Rome from 1994 to the present.
Poderaccio Camp, Florence (Italy)
Photo of Lorenzo Monasta, taken in December 2001, then published in part in Hasani B., L. Monasta, "Vite costrette. Un viaggio fotografico nel campo rom del Poderaccio", Verona, Ombre Corte, 2003.
