Now all Roma aged 14 or over are to be fingerprinted as part of what the government calls a “census”, supposedly aimed at improving their living conditions. Illegal camps are being bulldozed. Opposition politicians, harking back to the deportation of Gypsies to Nazi camps under Mussolini, call it persecution. To their dismay, however, opinion polls show the voters are firmly behind the government. Vigilantism is increasing, with at least one Gypsy camp in Rome the target of a suspected arson attack.

Perhaps the voters haven’t realised how many building sites, factories, restaurants and cleaning companies depend on immigrant labour. In vain, leading Italian industrialists point out that factories would grind to a halt if the hundreds of thousands of illegals were summarily thrown out. Immigrants themselves argue that the actions of a few spoil it for the hard-working, law-abiding majority, many of them second- or even third-generation whose children have known no other home. Some 40 per cent of the estimated 150,000 Roma in Italy have Italian citizenship.

Overall, though, Italy is simply uncomfortable with immigration. Certainly it doesn’t embrace the concept of the “multi­racial society”. On television, I have never seen an Asian in an advertisement and only once seen a black actor – playing a housewife giving her daughter chocolate in a scene of humdrum domestic harmony. I was sufficiently struck by it to mention the ad to an Italian friend who pointed out that the woman was, in fact, a star athlete. “She’d never get on-screen otherwise,” he claimed.

There is little integration, and more than a little xenophobia. Romans can be stand-offish even to northern Europeans. In part this may be because Italy has in recent history been a land of emigration. They’re not used to people coming the other way. Small wonder, perhaps, that our Bangladeshi neighbours seek to live under the radar where even the postman can’t find them.