It is this insistence on separation that alarms the Roma themselves.

TO BE NOTED: From the Guardian:

"Italy's new ghetto?

In the nation that housed the first ghetto, a new segregation is taking place. The persecution of Roma gypsies is shocking

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• 
• • Tana de Zulueta
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 March 2009 11.30 BST
  • Article history

People forget, but the European history of segregation began in Venice. Ghetto is a Venetian word. It was, and still is, a neighbourhood, one of the oldest in town, thought to be named after the iron foundry that once stood there. In the year 1516 the Venetian senate ruled that the city's Jewish inhabitants should be confined to this neighbourhood. Non-Jewish citizens could not live there, nor could the Jews live elsewhere. The world's first ghetto had been instituted.

The pope in Rome soon followed suit, ruling by papal bull in the year 1555 that the Jewish inhabitants of Rome were to be confined to a single neighbourhood. The area was sealed off, with just two points of entry and exit; the gates were guarded, barred at sundown and opened at sunrise.

Other restrictions were imposed, such as a ban on lending money to Christians. The only trade permitted was in cloth, new and old. To this day the oldest cloth shops in Rome are in and around the neighbourhood still known as il ghetto. The logic was that of separation, the wellspring of prejudice, discrimination and, ultimately, genocide. On 16 October 1943 100 German soldiers surrounded this same neighbourhood and captured 1,022 men, women and children and deported them to Auschwitz. Only 17 returned.

It was in Rome, on the orders of the Renaissance pope Paul IV, that the colour yellow, either as a garment or a patch of colour sewn on men and women's clothes, was first imposed to distinguish Jews. How could anyone forget the terrible lesson learned?

And yet once again in Italy a perilous experiment in residential segregation is taking shape. It is a discomforting comparison, but Gad Lerner, a columnist and television presenter who was born in Lebanon to Jewish parents and a naturalised Italian, has drawn attention to the parallels between the prejudice that preceded the persecution of the Jews and the treatment of today's gypsies.

The huge rambling gypsy encampment outside Rome's ring road known as Casilino 900 has shocked international visitors because of its bad conditions. But the brand new camp of Castel di Decima, another Roma settlement, with its rows of prefabricated huts miles from anywhere, is, if possible, even bleaker. In spite of the TV aerials and the children playing, it looks like a place of detention. All the more so now that it has been fenced off and uniformed police officers guard the gates.

Last year Italy's new government proclaimed a Roma "emergency", or emergenza nomadi. Overnight an estimated 150,000 Roma living in Italy became a national law and order problem, the target not only of special police measures, but also of increasingly brazen public hostility. Policemen in uniform descended on Roma settlements to supervise a census in which fingerprints were taken. In Naples three gypsy camps in the suburb of Ponticelli were burnt to the ground after an angry crowd had forced their frightened inhabitants to flee, escorted away by the police.

In February this year the Prefect of Rome, in his capacity as special commissioner for the Roma "emergency", issued new rules regulating life in the region's seven officially designated camps. The camps are to be gated, under police supervision. Though residence is to be temporary, as a prelude to further "integration", no indication is given of where those who have to leave, or are thrown out of the camps because they do not qualify, are expected to go. Milan's mayor has announced similar rules, including camp gates to be locked at 10pm. Protest has been muted.

Even Venice's progressive mayor Massimo Cacciari, a writer and professor of philosophy, who sparked a local uproar when he announced plans to build a Roma "village" for 30 families last year, explained in a recent television interview that the settlement, to be completed later this year, offers every guarantee of "separateness" from its non-gypsy neighbours.

It is this insistence on separation that alarms the Roma themselves. The Italian Roma musician Alexian Spinelli, who teaches at Trieste university, has warned that Cacciari's Roma village risks becoming a modern-day ghetto, leaving its inhabitants exposed to hostility, or worse. People cheered the deputy mayor of nearby Treviso, Giancarlo Gentilini, at a meeting last year when he growled: "I want a revolution against gypsies … I want to eliminate all the gypsy children who steal." Gentilini is a member of the Northern League, the party of Italy's interior minister, Roberto Maroni. Eva Rizzin, a researcher, who is herself Roma, has downloaded Gentilini's speech on her computer. "I feel terrible when I listen to it", she says. "If language like that were used against any other group people would be outraged."

Most politicians are not listening. Lerner thinks they should know better. "History has shown that the language of hate is soon followed by acts of violence," he writes in his blog."