The Tor Sapienza camp, just half an hour’s drive from the capital, is home to around 300 Roma, and is one of 127 formal camps in the country, according to a report from non-profit organisation Associazione 21 Luglio. For many years, the Italian government’s approach to Romani inclusion has been to place Roma in specially created, ethnically segregated camps, rather than regular social housing in mixed areas. Operating under the false assumption that all Roma are nomadic by nature, the authorities place Romani families, usually from Eastern Europe, into these so-called “nomad camps” on the edges of towns and cities, far from other people, and far from employment opportunities.

The camps are all-but abandoned by the state, left to increase in size beyond capacity, fall into disrepair, and become unsafe to live in. The 'toxic fires', which are the cause of much of the furore around the camp in Tor Sapienza, are set by families living in absolute poverty. In these poor living conditions, with little to no social support from the authorities, and in the absence of public waste collection, some Roma here must burn whatever they can in order to survive.

Some of the camps gradually become infamous; condemned by politicians and demonised by the media, until an order is finally given to forcibly evict the residents. When the big camps are demolished it normally hits the headlines: Gianturco, Naples in 2017, Camping River, Rome in 2018. Most of the families are made homeless, forced to build informal shantytowns on wasteland on the outskirts of cities. Others are relocated by authorities to a different government camp or social shelter, starting the cycle anew.

The assignment of soldiers to Romani camps outside of Rome is a result of an increase in personnel and resources for the government’s Safe Streets operation, a public security programme which uses Italian armed forces to combat crime in Italy. The programme, launched in 2008, was criticised at the time for being an ideological show of force, created solely for the purposes of advancing anti-immigrant and anti-Roma propaganda. Today, many of the 7,100 soldiers assigned to the operation are used to crackdown on immigration, administer migrant processing centres, and patrol immigrant areas of Italy’s cities.

"Unfounded, unmotivated and unlawful"

Operation Safe Streets was not the only policy which negatively targeted Roma during Silvio Berlusconi’s fourth and final term as prime minister. In 2008, Berlusconi declared a state of national emergency, dubbed the so-called “nomad emergency”, which signalled the start of his war on Roma and immigrants through police intimidation, illegal detentions, fingerprinting of children, forced evictions, and deportations. He justified the deployment of troops as a temporary crackdown on so-called “gypsy criminality”, but patrolling soldiers have since became a fixture of cities and towns across the country.

The use of the state apparatus to target and harass Roma lasted until 2011, when a decision by the State Council declared the government’s emergency security approach to be “unfounded, unmotivated and unlawful”. A court of cassation decision in 2013 reaffirmed this opinion, declaring the state of emergency as being against domestic laws as well as a plethora of international laws, not least the European Convention on Human Rights.