Only the wind hears us.
Giugliano in Campania, 2025.
ROMA is the story of a lost society, where the absence of human rights and miserable living conditions annihilate any form of dignity, which is thrown and lost among the dumps and rubbish heaps. Next to a highway, far from the built-up area, stands the Roma camp of Giugliano in Campania. The people in the camp have been nomads for about 30 years, when a few families from Bosnia arrived here after the war, deciding to settle on private land in search of refuge and peace. To date, those few families have grown to about 80. The camp is estimated to house at least 500 people, more than half of whom are children. While there is an eviction order scheduled for the end of April, the association 21 Luglio is fighting to give them hope.
The story of the Roma is just one of many now scattered around the world: stories of racial segregation and discrimination, the result of a mistaken narrative of wandering peoples moving through the natural course of history. A structural and ancient violence, that suffered by the Roma people, from Hitler to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The lack of a territoriality that legitimises their ethnicity and culture has helped radicalise a dominant narrative that reduces the Roma to stereotypes of social and political connotations, such as that of a nomadic and wandering culture, portraying them as perpetually homeless and a real threat to society. This has denied and continues to deny the history of the Roma, and the reality of the Giugliano camp is yet another example of ghettoisation and social exclusion.
In the Roma camp in Giugliano, the invisibility and dehumanisation of individuals is real and concrete. People live in makeshift houses, built of rotten wood and sheet metal, without any electricity, running water and a proper sewage system. The fountain outside the camp, along the road, is the only source of water, but it is not drinkable. Gas cylinders and wood stoves are shared within the households. Children play among the rubbish and dead rats, their faces are dusty and marked with sadness. They tell us that they do not go to school because they have no clean clothes, no notebooks in which they can write, no colours with which to draw. They play together, running among the flowering trees in the field that separates them from the asphalt. In January 2024, a nine-month-old girl, Michelle, died in a fire, caused by faulty electrical wiring. Today, another six-year-old girl is sick with cancer. The women, mostly pregnant, cook for the family with what little they have, while breathing in the toxic substances and waste around them. The town is far away, which makes it hard to move around to scrape together food, clothes and other materials with which to build shacks.
All this happens with the indifference of the local administration and social services, which perpetuate the social alienation and marginalisation of the community, which receives no aid of any kind, including health care, which - given the miserable living conditions - should be an absolute priority. The Roma community is thus deprived of the basic services that a state under the rule of law should guarantee. The continuous denial of basic human rights means that men, women and children simply do not exist.
The Roma camp in Giugliano is the archetype of a political and social system dominated by contradictory principles that elude any kind of real inclusion and integration. Maintaining the invisibility of these individuals materially located and placed on the margins of society is the irreversible condemnation of a system of protection of guaranteed rights, explicitly aimed at denying citizens the right to live in humane conditions.
The ineffectiveness of integration plans, the absence of adequate housing policies and the lack of interventions to ensure essential services - such as drinking water, electricity and healthcare - perpetuate structural discrimination and segregation. Abandonment and indifference, fuelled by historical prejudices and toxic narratives, continue to dehumanise entire communities. The childhood denied to children, the suffering of mothers and the despair of men become the burden of resilience of a people who scream and demand, in silence like so many others, the right to exist. Integration, now more than ever, given the global geopolitical context, is the only possible path to peace. The naturalisation of the real integration of communities, ethnicities and cultures that experience territorial diasporas and political oppression, is the only thing that will give understanding of the world and the future that awaits us. One day, those wandering peoples may be us again.
Written by Ludovica Crescente
Piero Corvo - ROMA
Giugliano in Campania, Italy. 2025.
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