In Italy there is a creeping apartheid. While 90,000 Roma people live in houses, for the other 35,000 there is a city apart. For many years these Roma populations lived in the city's margins, building their communities in abandoned spaces, but in recent years the municipality prepares for those Roma and Sinti people that have been living in camps for decades, new encampments with high densities of emergency structures, remote from primary services, controlled by armed guards and closed circuit cameras, with curfews and mandatory identification photocards and bar codes, and perimeter fences erected around the communities, like a prison.
Salviati University. A conceptually new school. A university centered in the abandoned zone where Roma and Sinti community members become our instructors. Because the bulk of research on Roma people is compiled by non-Roma people, we instead turn to the Roma community to provide our education. Otherness becomes dangerous for the status quo when capable of creatively representing its own struggles. Salviati University is open to every national and international group willing to initiate a conscious path towards a closer understanding of Roma communities under the leadership of its professors, who are highly specialized in their daily struggles.