Welcome ‘in’. Left-wing Tuscany and Romani migrants (1987–2007)

Abstract Although the Italian left was one of the largest popular movements for social change in Western Europe, at the end of the 1980s the Tuscan left-wing regional council imposed the construction of fenced camps for Romani immigrants supposedly in order to give Roma the possibility of developing their own traditional habits. By contextualizing the local political context within the post-1989 changes of left-wing politics vis-à-vis migrants in Italy, the paper discusses the rationale behind the construction of nomad camps. It examines the texts of the first two regional laws addressing Roma – passed in 1988 and 1995. It then compares that analysis with the ethnographic data collected in 2007 and 2008. In the conclusion it is put forward that the conditions of material and symbolic segregation that have been affecting Roma in Florence for more than twenty years are a consequence of specific culture-based strategies adopted by policy makers.