Inside the squalor of Italy's Roma camps

Her children are scrambling around her, barefoot, their lunches half-eaten. Somehow Ahmetovic tracks their movements with her eyes as pulls out her ID, a document for foreigners living in Italy.

"That's me," she says, pointing at a black and white photo of a younger women with long dark hair on fragile, faded paper in a thin, transparent plastic pocket. "It says I am from Bosnia-Herzegovina but I have never been there and I don't speak the language." Cue a huge grin: "One day," she jokes, "I would like to go on holiday to the country that is supposed to be mine."

Born in Brussels, Ahmetovic has been in Italy since she was a baby. But that does not make her Italian. That does not make her accepted. And that does not make her and her children safe in their own home. Because she is Roma - a gypsy, in her own words - and part of what remains Europe's most marginalised people.

Her fate, her limbo, is fast becoming emblematic. Europe's xenophobic right is on the march, and not just in Italy, and they are unleashing centuries-old prejudices against the continent's estimated 12m Roma. Some politicians, claims Ahmetovic, are scapegoating. "All they go on about is Zingari, Zingari, Zingari," she says using an Italian word, roughly translated as gipsy, that many people now see as highly pejorative.

Italy's policies - of maintaining camps - is becoming both the cause and the consequence of such scapegoating, of such prejudices, say critics.

"The situation in Italy is like a lesson on how not to deal with Roma, especially for the public sector," says Ann Morton Hyde, an independent Scottish expert on Roma inclusion.

It was here, in Italy, under a different national political regime, that photos of dead Roma youngsters on a beach sparked international outrage. But what are the real-life consequences of bigotry and continent-wide institutional failure? And what do Roma themselves feel about it?

Ahmetovic knows. She, her husband and her children live in a prefab container, 10m long by 2.5m wide. The family has gradually added to the structure, with sheds and shelters decorated with wagon wheels and tin-plate signs for Havana Club gin, Peroni and Pilsner beers and Red Bull. But it is not secure. "We have cockroaches, fat rats and when it rains, the water comes right through the roof," she says, her good humour fading, "The children are always ill. The place is overcrowded. We have too many neighbours. It's ugly."

Hers is the Lambroso camp, one of 10 formal or recognised settlements for Roma - some native-born Italians, most from Romania or the ex-Yugoslavia - within, just within, Rome's city limits. Such camps are, according to estimates from charity workers, home to just under 5000 people. Lambroso alone has around 190 residents, more than half of them children. There are also other Roma communities, unrecognised ones, where life is even more precarious.

Ahmetovic has lived in such camps, Italy's shanty towns, its makeshift barraccopoli, since she was brought to Italy as a baby. So have her children. "I want to change the life of my kids," she says. "I want them to be Italians citizens, leave here and get work."

But there is a Catch-22: to get out of the camps the Roma need jobs, but to get jobs, they need to get out of the camps.

So, without formal work, the men of the Lombroso make their livings clearing homes and basements. The stuff, the junk and the trash, they collect surrounds the camp. Broken washing machines, single shoes and scores of CDs, which sparkle in the heavy sun on the dried out Roman ground.

This mess has become one pretext for the right and the intolerant. Some have demanded the camps' closures. They are not subtle. This spring supporters of the far right Lega Nord and its leader Matteo Salvini - an admirer of Brexit and Nigel Farage - staged protests carrying "No to Roma camp" placards and plastic toy bulldozers.

Social media meme saying "Give Salvini a bulldozer".

Back in May Salvini himself tried to visit another camp, Candoni, further west of Lambroso amid the scrubland and bus and truck spots just inside Rome's ring road. He was not welcomed. One photo of his visit captured a hand, a finger raised, against a backdrop of police separating Salvini from angry Roma.

"Vulture," some youngsters shouted. "Disgusting." Later they explained that they thought Salvini had turned up with real bulldozers, not toy ones.

"They have been well taught," the Twitter-friendly populist typed in to his smartphone. "I shall leave it to you to comment on their desire to integrate."

Picture: Matteo Salvini

The politician told Ansa, Italy's main news wire agency, "Roma camps, official or unofficial, should no longer exist. The people who are here should find themselves a house."

Maria Miclescu agrees. Sort of. The Romanian-born 20-year-old, already a mother of two, lives in the Candoni camp, along with at least another 850 people, more than 12km from the Colosseum. She does not want her home bulldozed but she wants out.

"We are far from the city," she says at a lunch served at community centre not far from the camp. "We are hidden. We do our best to clean the camp but we want our own home. That is our dream."

She has been on a list for social housing for three years.

Miclescu is not just waiting for handouts. She and a group of women have set up a catering firm, called, in English, Gypsy Queens. Their food has started to attract some media buzz, rare positive publicity in Italy where, according to not-for-profit advocacy group Associazione 21 Luglio, three quarters of news stories about Roma don't include any Roma voices.

Advert for Gypsy Queens

I met Miclescu as part of an international group of journalists brought to Rome by a European Union-funded project called For Roma, With Roma to counter this particular issue. But organisers, backed by local charities, could not take us to Candoni. The camp, they said, was too tense. Three people had been shot days before.

Associazione 21 Luglio has tried to measure the scale of the camps, and their costs, social, criminal and financial. Its annual report for 2015 said there were 180,000 Roma in Italy, at least half of whom are Italian citizens. That is a quarter of one per cent of the country's population. One-in-five of these people, it reckons, live in camps.

The same report also lists violent attacks against Roma. These include 15 shootings and fire-bombings between February and August of last year alone. A 43-year-old father of 10, Roberto Pantic, was killed near Bergamo in Lombardy when a man opened fire on his camper van. The shooter was later convicted of murder - but not of racially aggravated murder.

Vincenzo Spinelli is more than familiar with the blood libel that fires up so much of such racist bile. "They say we steal babies," the Italian Roma explained, referring to one of the most commonly peddled myths."That is that nastiest thing people say."

Spinelli, now a mechanic, who has left the camps and married outside his community, wipes away tears when he remembers how he saw his mother treated in shops when he was young. She wore traditional long skirts and long hair of a gypsy woman. But bigotry applies to those who choose different dress too. And no more so than in school.

Poster from 21 Luglio: 'Discrimination Costs'

Gabriella Stojanovic was from a family of refugees from the war in Yugoslavia and ended up in a Roma camp. Now 24, she lives near Turin. Like Spinelli she has agreed to tell her stories to the For Roma, With Roma project.

She describes being written off at school. "When I was small, I wanted to be a doctor to save lives," she says. "Then one teacher told me I would never be a doctor and would probably never finish school, and end up like other Roma. I used to hate being Roma and I really hated living in the camp because it was looked down upon in school.

"People thought I was uncivilised, a wild person who did not know how to behave with other people. When I was seven we were given public housing but our neighbours were not very nice. If anything happened, they would say it was the 'gypsies'."

The Associazione 21 Luglio has calculated that one-in-five Roma in Italy have never started school. One-in-four, the charity reckons, have never finished.

NGOs are trying to fix this. They have tried to bus children to school and also to encourage enterprise. One such body is Arcisolidarietà, which supports Miclescu's Gypsy Queens. But its organiser, Valerio Tursi, admit politics gets in the way. Rome has just elected a new populist mayor, Virginia Raggi of the M5S or Five Star Movement. Will this make things worse? "I am not concerned," responds Tursi. "For the last 15 years Roma have been the main focus of electoral campaigns. It is as if they were the only problem Rome has. Conditions are worsening. But it is not because of the new mayor, but because of a process that has already begun."

Election poster for Virginia Raggi

There are currently prosecutions under way for the alleged misappropriation of money that should have gone to camps, part of a wider Mafia Capitale municipal corruption scandal uncovered in 2014. One alleged conspirator is said to have claimed there was more money to be made out of Roma and new migrants than there was out of drugs. Politicians implicated in that wide-ranging investigation include one of Raggi's predecessors as mayor, the rightist Gianni Alemanno, who was elected to shouts of "Duce" amid heightened tensions following the murder of an Italian woman by a Romanian Roma man.

It was Alemanno who launched a 'nomad plan' to resettle gypsies after the then prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, declared a Roma emergency in 2008. That sparked mass evictions and mass protests, as well as official complaints from bodies like Amnesty International. Now authorities recognise such policies were illegitimate.

Somebody is still making money from camps. But it is not the Roma. There were 80 forced evictions in Rome last year, according to the Associazione 21 Luglio, affecting some 1470 people. Those actions cost more than 1.8m euros, or 1250 euros per head.

Back at Lombroso, Ahmetovic's young teenage daughter sums up her mother's complaints about the camp. "It is like Auschwitz," she says.