Italy - Main Page

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Around 140,000-160,000 Roma, Sinti and Camminanti people live in Italy (0.3% of the Italian population). The majority are minors and no longer nomadic.

In accordance with both their citizenship and arrival in the country, we can distinguish three main groups:

Around 70,000 people are Italian citizens living in Italy since the fifteenth century and scattered all over the country: the most integrated Roma community lives in the Abruzzo and Molise regions, traditionally dedicated to breeding and trading horses while women practice palmistry. Other Roma communities live in Naples, Puglia, Basilicata. In Sicily small communities of Camminanti are still nomadic, and working as hawkers. The poorest community of Roma people lives in Calabria. About 30,000 Sinti - mostly evangelical Christians - live in the north working as amusement riders.
About 90,000 Roma people migrated from the Balkans in the 1990s following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Most of them are Muslims and Christians orthodox and live in camps in the north of the country.
Finally, the number of Roma people migrating from Romania has been increasing in the past few years: numerous communities have been reported in Italy's largest cities living in unauthorised camps.

No official data is available either for the latter or for other people staying in Italy without any kind of legal permission (the number of irregular immigrants is estimated to be 12-13,000).

Roma people are not recognised yet as an ethnic-linguistic minority but they benefit from the general law for the protection of minorities (Law of 15 Dec. 1999 n. 482). In the 1st European Conference on Roma people – organised in Rome in January 2008 by the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry presented its project to recognise their status as an ethnic and linguistic minority and to plan an integrated policy towards them. At the regional level, since 1984, some regions have passed laws aimed at protecting Roma and Sinti people and their culture.

In Italy, different Ministries are competent and endowed with resources to carry out activities aimed at improving the living conditions of Roma people. In order to coordinate their activities, at the beginning of 2008, some Ministries, including the Ministry of Labour, signed a Memorandum of understanding for Roma people submitted by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. The Memorandum has two main objectives:

carrying out a survey on the living and working conditions of the Roma people in order to elaborate measures concerning their integration;
setting up a working group to monitor the allocation of available resources and to create a national database.

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Italy - Main Page

Italy

Members of the Network

Around 140,000-160,000 Roma, Sinti and Camminanti people live in Italy (0.3% of the Italian population). The majority are minors and no longer nomadic.

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