Exclusivity and Exclusion: Roma Camps and the “Degypsification”of the Roman Urbs

by Karen Bermann and Isabella Clough Marinaro

IN THE WESTERN WORLD, the city of Rome was once the urbs par excellence. Yet the

English word suburb does not translate well into Italian; neither does the concept it denotes in

the context of the city today. There is periferia, the ragged semi-industrial edge around Rome’s

ring road. There is sobborgo, a residential district on the outskirts, and there are borgate, cheaply

—and often illegally—built neighbourhoods for the city’s poor. But all of these are uncertain,

contested terms and conditions that are very different from the North American concept of

suburb. Moreover, the relationship between the urban centre and its outskirts is changing

quickly as real-estate prices increasingly force many residents further away from the historic

centre, the city’s commercial, political and symbolic heart.1 Within this context a phenomenon

is developing which is causing heightened urban segregation and which, we argue, presents

a mirror image of the gated communities that are developing elsewhere in Europe and North

America. In response to rising fears about urban crime, Rome is pioneering its own system of

suburban residential enclaves: publicly-funded and isolated mega-camps to house the city’s

widely despised Roma (Gypsy) minority.2 These “gated communities” are promoted by the

Italian government as a blueprint, to be exported elsewhere, for the successful management

of Roma citizens, the ethnic minority most frequently blamed for crime and urban insecu-

rity in Italy. As other Western European governments struggle to deal with the rising numbers

of Roma immigrants from the new Eastern member states of the European Union,3 these

“gated community” camps may well spread.

The debates on gated communities provide a useful lens through which to view the

development of these camps in Italy. As Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers argue, the

European Union is itself increasingly resembling a gated community which expends resources

to keep out poor immigrants, based on fears that they may lower its members’ standard of

living and increase crime, while selectively welcoming other wealthier, highly-qualified for-

eigners.4 Migration from non-EU countries and, increasingly, movements from poorer to richer

EU states, is now one of the main themes of securitization discourses in European politics and

the media.5 Italy, often considered the soft underbelly through which unwanted immigrants

63Opposite: Fig. 2: Haircut, Monachina.ALL PHOTOS K.AREN BERMANN UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

easily sneak into the EU, is under particular pressure to show that it can protect its part of the

EU’s metaphorical fence. The current right-wing government won the 2008 election in part

by campaigning on this issue and continues to focus heavily on linking immigration to its

drive to make citizens feel more secure.6 Some European nations, most notably the UK,

strongly link feelings of insecurity to the rapid spread of fortress-like gated communities;7

however, the Italian situation has evolved more slowly. Since the acceleration of urbanization

in Italy during the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, private residential enclaves have

become a feature of the countryside around many of the country’s cities. The capital, Rome,

is no exception, with its leafy gated communities of Olgiata, Casal Palocco, Axa, and Torre

Gaia.8 There is as yet no systematic scholarship on this issue but it is clear that new ones are

developing. What is notable about these areas, and perhaps explains the lack of scholarly

attention they have attracted so far, is that they appear to be widely perceived as spaces of

luxury and privacy away from the congestion of the city, rather than primarily as militarized

fortresses to protect residents from urban crime.

We maintain that it is within this context that the state-funded mega-camps for Roma

should be read. These spaces function simultaneously as gated communities and as their

antithesis. They exist to provide a barrier that protects city residents from the perceived ene-

mies of their comfort and safety, but they do so by containing—by gating out—the source of

fear so that Romans do not have to gate themselves in for safety. Of course, such enclosures

are not new; Rome was the site of Italy’s longest-lived Jewish Ghetto (1555-1870), where the

entire community was forcibly gated in to protect the Christian population from contamina-

tion while ostensibly maintaining Jewish culture and protecting its inhabitants from attack.9

Similarly to the Ghetto, today’s camps serve as structures for the surveillance of an allegedly

subversive group. While they are not formally coercive, Roma increasingly have few alterna-

tives: reside there or be forced to live on the run. In a city where there is a chronic shortage

of public housing and where racism towards the Roma combines with their often critical

levels of poverty, standard accommodation is often impossible for them to obtain. The munic-

ipal authorities have declared that once enough camps exist to house 6,000 Roma, no other

Roma settlements will be tolerated.10 In other words, these camps serve to “degypsify” the

rest of the city. A crucial difference, though, between the camps and the Ghetto is that the

latter was centrally located, acting as a constant reminder of Catholic power over the popu-

lation while allowing Jews to continue to play the important economic roles assigned to

them. Today’s mega-camps are instead positioned well beyond the city’s ring road, impeding

the residents’ social and economic interaction with the rest of the population.

Bülent Diken powerfully argues that gated communities and camps (those for refugees

and other powerless groups, like Roma) share many similarities despite the obvious differ-

ences regarding who is housed and who manages the rules and fences which contain them.11

They are spaces of exceptionality and extraterritoriality; the regulations that govern the camp

residents largely do not apply to the rest of the population and often involve suspending basic

civil rights such as freedom of movement. They also exist as a form of pre-emptive risk man-

agement: gated communities protect their members from whatever threats they perceive to be

“out there,” while Roma camps subject people who may have no criminal record to constant

64 BERMANN + CLOUGH MARINARO

control and surveillance on the assumption that they will otherwise commit crimes. Camps

and gated communities are thus mirror images of each other; they both exist to isolate social

groups, the privileged and the unwanted, thereby creating an imaginary sense of order and

security in the city. Most fundamentally, these enclaves share a status as “non-places:”12 they

do not develop organically from the social context in which they are located and they allow

little interaction with it. Rome’s mega-camps are also closely related to another form of non-

place currently proliferating in Italy: holding centres, where undocumented foreigners and

asylum seekers are contained, often in prison-like conditions, while being processed by the

authorities. High fences, surveillance cameras, prefabricated barrack-like structures,lack of

spaces for socialization, a sense of transience without a clear duration or destination; these

are common features of all these spaces. The mega-camps are evidence of a convergence

between the management of Roma (many of whom are Italian citizens) and Italy’s increas-

ingly repressive policies towards migrants. They are part of a new era in the construction of seg-

regated and biopolitical spaces for Italy’s minorities and, as such, are part of a global spread of

the camp and the state of exception.13

“Nomad Camps” in the Roman Periphery

Today’s mega-camps are the result of a policy which was explicitly formulated in the 1980s to

support segregated accommodation, but the practice had been established decades before. Many

Roma had ceased to be nomadic by the time Italy’s economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s

ended, and many found themselves impoverished and living in the shantytowns which had

multiplied with the country’s rapid and largely uncontrolled urbanization. In the 1980s, many

of Italy’s regional governments passed laws for the creation of “nomad camps.” Although in

theory they were not gated, some of them were surrounded by high fences and the residents

were monitored by police. Thus, authorized and “tolerated” encampments on the fringes of

cities, generally made of up of small campers or wooden shacks, became the primary type of

accommodation envisaged by numerous local authorities.14 As Italy transformed into a country

of immigration in the 1980s and increased numbers of foreign Roma arrived, especially fol-

lowing the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Balkan wars of the 1990s, their

presence in cities such as Rome became increasingly visible and sometimes violently contested

by local residents. By the turn of the millennium there were three main typologies of camps

in the capital: publicly-built camps which provided prefabricated metal huts (known as “con-

tainers”), electricity and plumbing; “tolerated” camps which had been established illegally but

for which the authorities sometimes provided chemical toilets and a water source, thereby

informally recognizing their existence; and unauthorized camps which usually had no amenities

and where the lack of hygiene and exposure to other dangers were often extreme. By 2000,

there were a total of twenty-six camps around Rome.15 Most were within the city’s ring road,

usually in proximity to working-class residential neighbourhoods where the Roma often

shopped and accessed services.

The rise in public hostility against these encampments was not only due to their growing

size and number but arguably reflected more profound changes which have been occurring

65

in the city’s peripheral areas in the last two decades. Since the 1990s, the liberalization of

rules governing the housing market has resulted in a massive increase in real estate value and

a shortage of affordable rental accommodation in the city centre and its immediate residential

neighbourhoods. As a result, new housing projects are mushrooming in Rome’s hinterland,

causing the city to sprawl and merge with surrounding towns.16 Many of these new residential

areas are integrated with shopping malls and multi-screen cinemas in a process increasingly

reminiscent of North American cities. With this expansion, the once-peripheral areas in

which the Roma camps appeared have now become much more desirable due to their rela-

tive proximity to the city centre where many Romans still work and socialize and to their

accessibility to the ring road which no longer represents the city’s boundary but is instead the

fastest link to the rest of Rome. The symbolic and financial value of these neighbourhoods has

risen and so has the aversion to the Roma encampments whose presence endangers that

value. The response of municipal authorities since the mid-1990s has therefore been to

demolish the most problematic encampments and to re-house their inhabitants in areas fur-

ther outside the city that have not been colonized by the new urban sprawl. Rome’s munic-

ipal government’s current official policy on the issue, formally announced in July 2009,17

states that the city intends to provide thirteen “villages” (the institutional euphemism for

mega-camps) to accommodate a total of 6,000 Roma by the end of 2010, and to demolish all

other encampments. Where the rest of Rome’s estimated 6,000-8,00018 Roma are to live once

their homes are bulldozed is not mentioned. In fact, precisely because the available spaces for

housing them away from public view are shrinking, the authorities have failed to create accom-

modation for thousands of Roma, many of whom now live in the (often geographically cen-

tral) interstices of the city, along riverbanks or in abandoned buildings, which have long pro-

vided refuge for homeless migrants.19 Seven such camps already exist but due to delays it is

likely that, in the coming years, the current hybrid situation will continue, with over 2,000

Roma living in mega-camps,20 thousands in the decades-old “tolerated” encampments, and

many others in the interstitial shanties.

The following two sections of this article examine one tolerated and long-standing

encampment now slated for demolition, La Monachina, and one of the mega-camps already in

existence, Castel Romano, focusing on their respective degrees of “gatedness.” Geographic location,

transportation options, and modes of surveillance are all factors that constitute the metaphorical

“gate” as well as the real fences that enclose each of these settlements. “Gatedness,” or lack

thereof, raises questions about the possibilities of social and economic exchange between

interior and exterior, or what we call porosity. Gated communities for the wealthy are successful

to the degree to which their porosity is controlled by the inhabitants. We argue that the publicly-

funded mega-camp intentionally and drastically amplifies the conditions of “gatedness” or

exclusion which are present in the informal tolerated encampment while reducing to near

zero the porosity that is found there.

66 BERMANN + CLOUGH MARINARO

Monachina

On the western edge of the city, beyond the ring road, lies a triangular patch of land which is

the resultant of road engineering and topography. (fig. 1) It is bordered by traffic on all three

sides: the six-lane via Aurelia, the narrow via La Monachina, and a highway overpass. This

land belongs to ANAS, the road-construction and maintenance company, which once used

the space to store equipment. The highway exchange is a non-place par excellence:21 tiny, with-

out apparent cultural significance, without land value, and, in theory, uninhabitable. It is here

that a community of approximately 100 Roma, members of an extended family from the for-

mer Yugoslavia, have been living since 1995. The Monachina camp is self-built, managed, and

maintained. People live in campers and small wooden houses constructed with materials that are

mostly found and recycled. It is defined as “spontaneous” or “improvised” by the authorities

and the media, but in fact a complex logic, not readily apparent, has developed over the years

which reflects relationships and affinities in the organization of spaces, the orientation of win-

dows and doors, and the network of garden hoses that snakes through the site, carrying water

to each dwelling.

67

Fig. 1: Monachina. Courtesy Google Maps.

Shortly after the encampment was founded, the city provided chemical toilets and a high

metal fence which encloses the entire site. After seven years, a water tap was installed. These

infrastructural contributions are evidence of the complex and ambivalent relationship between

camp and municipal government and are reflected in the term “tolerated.” There are no gates

in the fence; rather, it is interrupted by small openings at several points along the via La

Monachina which constitute pedestrian access, and a gap large enough for vehicles to pass

through functions as the main entrance. Here one finds the tap which is the single source of

the settlement’s water. One house is near this entrance; its doors and windows open onto the

entry and its front porch is often occupied by a resident. There are many watchful eyes here,

and there is a constant awareness of a vehicle slowing down as it passes, the sound of an

engine starting up or dying down, the slam of a car door.

The fence does not serve to keep people in, though it does discourage children from run-

ning into traffic. It operates as a wall, creating a positive sense of interiority, enclosure, and

safety. It is a trellis for vines and flowers, a place to hang laundry, pots and pans and children’s

toys, to air out towels and carpets. There are places where the fence can no longer be seen,

and places where it cannot be seen through. Curious drivers who slow down to have a look

at “Gypsies” are obscured; the harsh, absurd fact of living on a highway exchange, and the

68 BERMANN + CLOUGH MARINARO

Fig. 2: Monachina, through the fence.

condition of vulnerability and isolation there, are concealed. The sense of being “outside” of

everyday Italian society is counterbalanced with a rich sense of being inside, fostered by the

fence and its domestic lining and ornament. This description, however, should not distract

from the dire poverty and dangers that face the residents of Monachina. If a petrol bomb were

thrown from a passing vehicle in the dark (as happened in another encampment in Rome in

2007 and again on a massive scale in Naples in 2008), the fence would be of no help at all. When

the police arrive regularly with dogs and bullhorns to check papers at dawn, the veneer of

enclosure is gone. The fence is revealed to be strips of metal, nothing more. (figs. 2, 3)

While the fence does not keep people out in any literal sense, it does signify a boundary,

keeping traffic away more successfully than a curb and restricting points of entry. It expresses

clearly the fact that Monachina is not entirely open, not entirely public. Its interior “streets”

—paths of dirt or gravel—are technically within the city limits, yet they are not city streets.

Not everyone is welcome there, or may take up residence there. Monachina’s location func-

tions metaphorically as a fence, a distancing mechanism. No sidewalks lead there and it is so

elevated on the highway side that it is entirely invisible to the traffic speeding below. The

sense of isolation in the camp, though, is partial and fluctuating. Monachina is not prison-

like; there is constant coming and going. Shops, coffee bars, and gas stations are a short car

ride or, if necessary, a 20-minute walk away. A bus stops nearby. Children play across the road

and teenagers hang out, leaning against the fence, both near to and separated from their parents.

Roma and some non-Roma friends come by for coffee and a chat. This mixture of open and

closed is clearly expressed in the community’s mail delivery arrangement. The camp acquired

a single street address for purposes of postal delivery and legal residence. The postman stands

at the main entrance and extends the mail across the threshold with an outstretched arm. He

is loath to enter, and in any case does not know how to deliver letters to individual dwellings.

Thus mail comes only partway to the recipient via the proper institution. It stops at the fence,

and the rest of the trip must be completed by a resident. The city’s infrastructural contribu-

tions to Monachina, which are surrogates for its presence—water tap, chemical toilets, and

fence—are located at and define the border.

Monachina, then, can be thought of as a partially-gated community. This ambivalence is

part of its very identity. It is both improvised and of long standing, unauthorized and tolerat-

ed, place and non-place. Ambivalence characterizes its relationship to the larger community;

its inhabitants are well-known in the neighbourhood, yet they live in a situation of liminality.

They are locals at the coffee bar and the gas station, yet when they leave they return to a place

that most other locals never visit. Like wealthy residents of an upscale gated community, they

are both of and not of the local scene. Monachina is porous, is in a condition of limited, partial

exchange with its surroundings. Although it is under some surveillance by the police, who pay

a visit every few days, it affords its residents the freedom to build their homes, to come and

go and receive guests at will. Both enclosure and porosity contribute to Monachina’s sense of

place, in Marc Augé’s cultural and anthropological terms. Since 2009, though, it has been on

the city’s list of the first five camps slated for demolition. Where the Monachina residents will

live once their homes of fifteen years are bulldozed is unknown, but it is likely that many will

be moved to a mega-camp similar to Castel Romano.

69

Castel Romano

The setting for the Castel Romano mega-camp sounds appropriate, desirable, even, for a gated

community: outside Rome but accessible by car, close to a major road, on a nature reserve,

and near a designer outlet mall of the same name. But on Google Maps one sees it as a stark

interruption among green fields. (fig. 4) Two rectangles of what looks like bare earth sit at the

edge of one of Rome’s fastest and most dangerous traffic arteries, the via Pontina. These are stud-

ded with smaller rectangular objects aligned in a grid; metal containers of the type used for

emergency housing. The site is without vegetation. Castel Romano, which holds up to 1,000

people, is one of the first mega-camps built by the municipal government to house Roma. Its

inhabitants were evicted in 2005 from their authorized settlement near the center of Rome

due to critical hygiene conditions. They were first sheltered in tents, until permission to cir-

cumvent the ban on building in a nature reserve was obtained.22 Walter Veltroni, Rome’s left-

wing mayor who oversaw the camp’s construction, called it a “solidarity village.” (fig. 5)

There is no signage along the road, and no visible point of access to Castel Romano. The

mega-camp announces itself to the via Pontina by means of a high gridded metal fence.

70 BERMANN + CLOUGH MARINARO

fig. 4: Castel Romano. Courtesy Google Maps.

Residents and visitors encounter the police who guard the entry, checking papers and ask-

ing questions, limiting access to guests authorized by the city government. There is no gate—

the police are, effectively, the gate. The fence also operates as a safety precaution, making it

impossible for children and animals to wander into the via Pontina and, by narrowing the

point of entry, discouraging adults from attempting to cross the road at that point. Indeed

there have been a number of fatalities when residents of the camp, desperate to avoid the

long walk from the nearest bus stop, ran across the road. The fence delineates the rectangle

of land within the nature reserve that is now home to the camp. This further underscores the

fact that everything that is inside—containers, infrastructure, etc.—is the property of the city

government, not of the residents. It suggests, too, the possibility of an intensified level of sur-

veillance and limits to movement. While restrictive regulations for these camps, introduced

in 2009,23 are not fully applied yet at Castel Romano, the fence allows their complete imple-

mentation at any moment. This would include closed-circuit television and 24-hour police

patrols around the perimeter of the camp as well as inside it. It would also oblige residents

to carry special ID cards in order to log their movements in and out. Guests would have a

10 p.m. curfew.

71

fig. 5: Interior, Castel Romano.

The fence is, however, three-sided; the rear of the camp, where the ground descends into

a garbage-filled ravine, is open. It is here that wild boar from the nature reserve enter at night to

root about in garbage. Inside, no laundry hangs on the fence and no vines climb it; no attempts

have been made to domesticate it from the interior, not even along the road, where trucks

rush by at all hours. Here containment can only be understood in terms of incarceration; where

there is no sense of autonomy a refusal to engage with the environment may be regarded as

a form of resistance.24 Where the possibilities of movement are severely limited, interiority

and containment are purely negative terms, suggesting isolation and an intense claustrophobia.

It is agoraphobia, as well, which arises from the regular, wide-open, empty spaces between

rows of containers, the big sky with no tree to provide shelter, the view of empty fields or

speeding trucks beyond the fence.

Yet, while it is its most literal symbol, the fence is, in fact, the least significant of the tac-

tics of containment. The tactics are economic, practical and psychological; they work together

and reinforce each other. Isolation is the first and foremost of these. Camp residents have

been removed here, 20 kilometres away from the city centre and from the schools which

many of the children attended before their relocation. Some have cars, but many do not. The

72 BERMANN + CLOUGH MARINARO

fig. 6: Bus Stop, Castel Romano.

cost of gasoline is high; and, significantly, no access road has been built to allow vehicles to

accelerate or decelerate to or from the via Pontina. Contributing to this difficulty is the frequent

and sometimes illegal confiscation of cars by police.25 The micro-economies that many Roma

depend on for income—hauling, collecting discarded materials from building sites, salvaging

and reselling metal, street-vending, various kinds of metalwork—require vehicles. The spa-

tial organization at Castel Romano makes such work difficult and, in a vicious circle, without

money, mobility is further reduced. For car-less residents, movement to and from Rome’s

city centre is arduous as the trip takes at least an hour, sometimes two and a half, by public

transportation. The bus stop going towards the city is on the shoulder of the via Pontina; traf-

fic passes frighteningly close, and bus drivers often do not stop for “gypsies.”26 (fig. 6)

Returning from Rome, the nearest bus stop is 3 kilometres away, on the other side of the

road. It is reached by a 20-minute walk along a muddy path beaten by the Roma in an

unpaved ditch along the road.

The containers at the front of the camp are well cared for inside and out, and the

ground is clean and covered with gravel. However, this too costs hard work. Water, usual-

ly brown and sandy, trickles out of kitchen and bathroom taps for short and erratic periods.

The plumbing infrastructure is radically inadequate for the needs of the population; a home

burned to the ground in 2008 because there was no water to fill the fire hoses. It is also

polluted; hepatitis and dermatological illnesses, especially among children, occurred when

residents first arrived and drank, cooked, and washed with the water. Now, it is only used

for cleaning homes; bottled water for cooking and drinking is carried in from supermar-

kets with great difficulty. The sewage system is also inadequate. Lack of water makes it

impossible to flush the system properly, leading to constant blockages and environmental

pollution; the septic tanks at the rear of the camp are overflowing and malodorous.27 The

problems of washing at Castel Romano contribute to the acute sense of isolation; parents

are often ashamed to send their children to school, adding a further layer in their obstacles

to acquiring an education which would perhaps help improve their long-term prospects. A

pervasive sense of alienation is associated with living here, which does not exist to the same

degree in Monachina. Residents often compare Castel Romano to a zoo or a “lager,” a con-

centration camp.28

“Degypsification” is more than removing Roma from the city centre and its nearer suburbs;

it also means forcing them out of settlements where, despite their de facto segregation and

often dire living conditions, they have had some degree of autonomy and freedom of movement

and where the possibility of interaction with non-residents exists. Degypsification increasingly

means forcing Roma into “non-places” outside the city, like Castel Romano, which are char-

acterized above all by separation on many levels. The new mega-camps, in theory, make gated

communities unnecessary; they perform the same function. The government’s policy of forced

and policed segregation encourages the perception that the city centre is clean and safe—and

has been made so for those who can afford to live there and to visit. Thus it is not only the

wealthy gated communities but the city centre too that is “gated.” Both are “exclusive,” since the

Roma–and other immigrants and groups perceived as “criminal elements”—are excluded.

Given this, the idea of the city centre—the heart of the urbs—as a collection of “public” spaces,

73

as anthropological “place” par excellence, and as the place where civil liberties are enjoyed, is

impoverished today. And perhaps, as a consequence, the spaces in between where most of us

live, spaces which are neither Roma camps nor exclusive gated communities nor the city center,

are gated too and thus the poorer for it.

1. Michael Herzfeld, Evicted from Eternity. The Restructuring of Modern Rome, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).

2. The term Roma is used as shorthand here to refer to very diverse groups in Italy which are generically labeled aszingari (Gypsies) by the majority population. There are currently an estimated 120,000-160,000 Roma living inItaly, about half of whom are Italian citizens, and about 11 million in the EU, where they are the biggest ethnicminority. OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation) “Recent Migration of Roma in Europe,” 2008.Accessed 29 Oct 2010, From: http://www.osce.org/search/?displayMode=3&lsi=1&q=roma+migration&GO=GO

3. France’s mass deportation of over 1000 Roma back to their EU countries of origin (mainly Bulgaria and Romania)in the summer of 2010 is a recent and widely condemned example.

4. Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers “The European Union as a Gated Community: The Two-faced Border andImmigration Regime of the EU,” Antipode 39, Vol. 2, (2007): 291-309.

5. Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, (London: Routledge, 2006).

6. Marco Brunazzo and Mark Gilbert, “The Right Sweeps the Board,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 13, 3 (2008):422–430.

7. Rowland Atkinson and John Flint, “Fortress UK? Gated Communities, the Spatial Revolt of the Elites and Time-Space Trajectories of Segregation,” Housing Studies 19, 6 (2004): 875-892. S. Bagaeen, and O. Uduku eds., GatedCommunities, (London: Earthscan, 2009). Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City, (London: Penguin, 2009).

8. Literary descriptions of some of these places can be found in G. Cesara, La città fuori le mura, (Rome: LaRepubblica, 2005)

9. Kenneth Stow, Theater of Acculturation: The Roman Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century, (Seattle: University of WashingtonPress, 2001).

10. Isabella Clough Marinaro, “Between Surveillance and Exile: Biopolitics and the Roma in Italy,” Bulletin of ItalianPolitics 1, no. 2(200): 265-87.

11 Bülent Diken, “From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the End of the City,” Citizenship Studies8, 1 (2004):83-106.

12. Marc Augé, Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London: Verso, 1995).

13. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). See alsoGiorgio Agamben, State of Exception, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

14. Nevertheless, Roma and Sinti sometimes bought houses or apartments privately and some municipalities did pro-vide public housing.

15. Comune di Roma, “Map of geographical locations and living conditions of camps in Rome,” [Internal document]2000.

16. Giovanni Caudo and Alessandro Coppola, “Periferie di cosa? Roma e la condizione periferica,” Parolechiave 36,(2006): 97-116.

17. Comune di Roma, “Il Piano Nomadi,” (2009). Accessed 29 Oct 2009, From: http://www.google.com/search?q=piano+nomadi+pdf+comune&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:it:official&client=firefox-a

18. Amnesty International, “The Wrong Answer: Italy’s ‘Nomad Plan’ Violates the Housing Rights of Roma in Rome”(2010). Accessed 30 Oct 2010. From: www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/EUR30/001/2010/en

19. Pierpaolo Mudu, “La circonferenza apparente: la perferia romana tra luoghi comuni e non comuni”, Parolechiave36, (2006): 117-142.

20. Comune di Roma, “Il Piano Nomadi.”

21. Augé.

74 BERMANN + CLOUGH MARINARO

22. Riccardo Iori, “Roma, il business del campo rom fuori dal Raccordo,” Il Manifesto, 4 November 2007.

23. Commissario Delegato, “Commissario delegato per l’emergenza nomadi nel territorio della Regione” &“Regolamento per la gestione dei villaggi attrezzati per le comunità nomadi nella Regione Lazio” (2009). Accessed30 Oct 2010. From: http://www.prefettura.it/roma/index.php?noredir=1&f=Spages&s=download.php&id_sito=1199&file=%2FFILES%2Fallegatinews%2F1199%2Fregolamento.pdf&coming=%2Froma%2Findex.php%3Ff%3DSpages%26s%3Dnews.php%26nodo%3D21328&tt=ok

24. There are, nevertheless, situations in Castel Romano where residents have worked hard to establish a sense ofhome.

25. During fieldwork in the camp, the authors witnessed one such confiscation despite the car owner’s up-to-dateinsurance and registration papers.

26. One rainy day the authors waited for an hour and a half; five buses went by without stopping.

27. A technical analysis of the camp’s infrastructure was carried out on-site in February 2008 by the Iowa StateUniversity Architecture Rome Program and Laboratorio Architettura Nomade under the leadership of KarenBermann and Alexander Valentino.

28. Many Roma and Sinti were interned in prison camps in Italy during World War II and some were deported to Germanconcentration camps after 1943. While clearly no comparison can be made between the Nazi camps and today’sRoma “Villages,” these comments reflect the fact that many Roma are aware of their recent European history.

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