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EX-OSMANNORO

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010



This was just about the only place where Romanian Roma ('gypsies') could live in Florence. An abandoned factory owned by one shareholder in Serbia, called ex-Osmatex in Osmannoro on the outskirts of Florence, in the Comune of Sesto Fiorentino. They had no water, no light, no rubbish removal, and had to leave the clothes they could not wash with other garbage piled up in the middle of the camp. Which brought in the rats. As big as those in Robert Browning's Pied Piper and as dangerous, eating baby's feet. Eating the Easter feast Margarita and her family had hoped to share after Mass, after their long Orthodox fast of no meat, fish, oil, milk, fat. Yet, somehow Margarita was always able to wash, splashing herself with the sign of the cross in the morning, and took her family's clothes to the laundromat. It cost 50 euro to have someone build this shelter out of material no one else wanted. Then it was bulldozed by the police, then burnt down by the Morrocans, even poorer than the Roma, then, 15 January 2010, it was bulldozed for the last time. Their blankets and clothes were bulldozed along with the shelters, all they had robbed from them by us.

I took this photograph, with Margarita's consent, calling it 'Povertà', 'Poverty'. I know Margarita well. She is the plump one, with most beautiful eyes, and a lovely laugh, who gardens all the stinging nettles in exchange for a meal and clothing we give her, and who learned the alphabet, after writing her name for the first time in our library.





Then this other. Calling it 'Bellezza', 'Beauty'. I submitted this to the Misericordia for their competition for photographs showing marginality.

But then the latest bulldozing took from them even this crude shelter.



Here we see Margarita huddled beneath blankets. It was bitterly cold. At first, following the bulldozing by the police, they slept in the street. After two nights the Valdensian church took them in for a week, then they were given a room in Prato for a week, then they stayed with the men in the Albergo Popolare for a week. Now they are back to sleeping in the street. The Vigili Urbani telling them to do so in groups of three, separate from each other, including breaking up the families with women and babies. Margarita brings her bedding to us to look after during the day because, she tells us, if we don't, the police will 'steal' it from them.

I have been going around begging for them, to the Misericordia, to Caritas, to the churches. If only they could have an abandoned convent, with water and a light and garbage removal and the right to work, repairing the building themselves, they could then send money home to their starving and freezing families in Romania, where even the sea has frozen and the wood and food run out and where their babies are with their grandparents. They don't need millions of euro. They do need a roof, water, electricity, rubbish removal, a legal address and an alphabetization programme. They can manage the rest, so resourceful are they.



Their story, Indo-European, in Romania they became slaves from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, and Christian. They are subject to the same discrimination and resulting illiteracy and poverty in Romania as were Blacks in America before Civil Rights. The Roma are Europe's largest and poorest minoity. Italy, unlike Spain, has chosen not to participate in the EU Decade of Roma Inclusion. The Roma from Romania are European Citizens. But there has been no project to allow them to enter into their citizenship. Tonight, snow is forecast again in Florence. My thoughts are with these families, women, babies, men who are ill, our poorest of the European poor.



We are now in April. These families, these European citizens, these fellow Christians, have had to sleep under bridges, then had the police take from them, again, their blankets, their clothes, their medicine, forbidding them to sleep there because there was a baby with them. Now they must sleep in groups of no more than three in the open streets, under the rain. They are not allowed to work because they do not have a legal address. They are constantly fined, fines they cannot possibily begin to pay. Are constantly ordered to return to Bucharest to have a stamp on their documents, and the tickets for Romania cost 80 euro each way. In Romania Social Assistance threatens to remove their children, looked after by the grandparents, to place them in orphanages with AIDS. Their only hope for the survival of their children, forbidden work in both countries, is to beg.

April 2010


Read: Antonio Tabucchi. Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento: Vivere da Rom a Firenze. Firenze: Feltrinelli, 1999. JBH


AGRUSTIC SOMNACUNI || ROMANY || CRADLE || LET US PRAISE THE ROM || CHUPPA || MEDIATHECA 'FIORETTA MAZZEI' ||  'ENGLISH' CEMETERY || AUREO ANELLO ||