Fascism is nothing if ever unoriginal. With this comment you can see the scenes which greeted the election of Rome's Mayor on the 28th of April on a platform of cleansing the city of 20,000 gypsies.
You can quite clearly identify the salutes from the angry young and not so young types and you can quite clearly read the name on the election banner which drapes the bannister of one of Rome's principle public buildings.

Many people don't care if the hate policy of Rome's mayor, an ex-minister in a Berlusconi cabinet co-incide with an Italian wide exasperation at the petty crime they blame on Europe's last nomadic ethnic group. An exasperation which has already provoked local, municipal and regional adjustments to laws across Europe. An exasperation which has already stretched applications of laws as varied as sanitation to class-room overcrowding in the most obtuse efforts to disguise 21st century ethnic cleansing in Europe.

But of course the Roma or Romani or Gypsies simply move on, Don't they?

Nobody has suggested a homeland for them. If you go down to wikipedia you see a flag someone suggested for them. The blue sky above and the green land below and the red wheel of a caravan might remind one of the Aboriginal flag of Australia or a simple a piece of wishful thinking that has never really been flown anywhere beyond a .sgv file. They mostly don't live in green fields or below blue skies, you see. Spain moved them out of flood channels in Madrid and Andalucia because of the risk of flooding the worst recorded year of drought imminently threatened them with. Catalonia moved them on because its schoolrooms were too crowded to accomodate children with the lowest incidence of primary and secondary education attendence in Europe. Switzerland moved them on because despite once upon a time including their language in its polyglot valleys of secrets and riches the modern Switzerland relies on green belt areas for oxygen and they can't camp there and breath it for free, besides the Swiss simply don't like them .

You don't really get far in life when the only people who appear to like you are the kind of people who invent silly flags for you. Helping the Romani really means asking a tough question so that we move a step ahead of the wave of hatred which Berlusconi is capitalising on to expel the Romani (or as he calls them ""an army of evil"). The troubles in Naples are reportedly not based on the hate-stirring of Italian fascists but a quaint story of how a 16yr old Romani girl broke into a flat to steal a baby. Substitute the word "Jewish" for "Romani" and prefix "Christian" before "baby" and you could almost make a ridiculous comparison to the hatred of the 1930's.

The horrible question is this :-

Considering we accept that nasty law-abiding types in Southern Europe who routinely elect corrupt Mafia ridden governments now blame all their woes on "the Gypsy question", are we prepared to take in a million Gypsies? Because the 20,000 to be expelled from Rome will join the tens of thousands expelled from Naples and the south on the autostrade freeways built by Mussolini on the long road north.

Yep. one million Romani. a people without a homeland. good with languages. mobile. musical. commercially adept. good looking. don't eat much....,

 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080514.wberlusconi0514/BNStory/International/home

From Italian left-wing press "Climate of Pogrom against Roma in Naples"
 http://www.unita.it/view.asp?IDcontent=75415
Second camp torched in Naples
 http://www.ansa.it/opencms/export/site/notizie/rubriche/daassociare/visualizza_new.html_73454310.html