Well, not caring about an issue and leaving those effected alone, doesn't really mean that you don't have a problem, doesn't it?


Correction: we are still a nation of immigrants (approx. 45.000 a year) and we are still discriminated, especially in Central\Northern Europe and the UK. I know from the few blogs I follow on Italians living abroad...so it's a fact. Sadly.

They only difference is that we don't play the "race card".

well i guess youre right my apologies. gypsie's here are relatively low in population or else we would have the same problems as you guys have. here they are only in a few neighborhoods. and yes everyone hates them there and wants to get them out. and when i said no one actually cares im reffering to people who live outside those neigborhoods.

most of those troublemakers are called turks or moroccans because they cant tell the difference only when they get caught or when people live with them they know they are gypsie's and not any other immigrant. and seriously i have seen this happening that people mistake them for turks or moroccans. and also i didnt have any troubles with them yet but in my old neighborhood they shot 2 gang leaders down because they where acting like cowboys.

You're not ignorant you say? What about your comment of "I live in Holland, and we have gypsies but no one here is bothered by them so they must not be a problem in Italy

Wiki is often inaccurate, you know this. Anyone can post anything they want on there.

FWIW, I totally agree with Yigido, and dont think he should feel like he has to apologise at all. It's not "liberal" stance, its not a "bleeding heart" stance, it DECENT HUMAN BEING stance. You dont write off an entire race for the criminality of a part.

Ive read this thread a bunch of times, and every time I start typing a reply then think "You know what? I dont want to get involved." But this is too much.

Ive spent time in Southern Spain and read up on a lot of things, but its always a "friend of a friend" story. Ive listened to old Italian guys rail at the "bloody gypsies", full of a million dastardly stories, but when you press them for stuff thats actually happened to them, they basically all (well the two old Southern Italian gentleman in question)admit that actually, besides one time they gave some gypsy a few lira, they'd actually had nothing to do with at all with Gypsies in general, besides knowing a couple of boys from a Gypsy family that YES actually lived in a house and YES actually had a dad who worked for a living and YES they had a crush on their hot, older gypsy sister.

Basically, they admitted that they'd pretty much just inherited their prejudices. From parents that inherited theirs against a people that "did things different". Its bullshit.

Im definitely not saying there's not a high prevelance of crime. Hell, in Andalucia I bought my drugs of an old Gypsy woman who had her extended family about her pretty much 24/7. A pretty Gypsy girl once smiled and gave me a beautiful rose in Seville. I smiled graciously and thanked her in my broken Spanish as she smiled back. As I started walking on, a heavy hand fell on my shoulder and I turned to be facing a large, hairy guy who angrily demanding something or other (I gathered that much) Luckily my Spanish grandfather was on scene to flip the guy a $2 coin (well, euro coin) and tell him to bugger off and stop trying to scam his yokel tourist grandson with his sexy daughter. On the beach at Cadiz, a Gypsy looking guy had a bunch on stuff on a beach towel for sale. I bought a shitty pair of headphones off him for three euro. They lasted 2 days.

Whoa. These guys are frickin criminal masterminds.

Oh yeah. I forgot to mention I had my pocket picked one time. When I realized, my family laughed about how the Gypsies saw me coming from a mile away. (Mrs Meatballs didn't think it was so funny . Besides a grand total of 7 euro's, I also lost a stick of bubblegum I had placed in there for safekeeping. And who knows? I could have just dropped the damn wallet. I bet there's many guys that have otherwise lost something somehwere in Europe and just known IT HAD TO HAVE BEEN THOSE DAMN GYPSIES! NO WAY IM DUMB ENOUGH TO LET SOMETHING FALL OUT OF MY POCKET!

I hear what you're saying. You're saying "Meatballs, you dont know. You live in bloody Australia. Just cuz you went to Spain for a bit dont mean you know Gypsies." WRONG. When I was growing up I was best mates with this Romanian kid. And he, his siblings and his parents all strongly identified as Roma, as gypsies. They didn't live in tents, they didn't "teach their kids to rob and steal", they had their kids taught at schools, their father worked as a boilermaker and their mother made great food. These were great people. And lest you think Id mistake one family unit as indicative of more beyond that, there was an extended family pretty much spread throughout Australia, comprising a number of families, that got togetgher and did family stuff like NORMAL PEOPLE. Because despite what part of them are known for, they are normal people.

Im sorry to rant. I dont mean to. But the fact is there's tangents everywhere. For many years there was a deeply ingrained governmental prejudice against Australian Aborigines, basically accusing them of everything people assign to Gypsies, and cannabalism. In the States...well we all know too well what went on there. In China, it was the ethnic Manchurians. By the arguments onthis board, one could write off the entire Italian peoples since "they created the mafia, and some of them teach it to their kids". The entire German people could be written off, because, well, they were all basically cool with Hitler at one stage. By thst logic, every race could be written off worthless, no good criminals or otherwise douchebags.

mussolini i don't know where your parents are living in italy, i bet in north italy where the vast majority of gypsies roma actually are living, because in the south they are absolutely nothing even in pretty crime underworld except some gypsies sinti affiliated to ndrangheta but they are italian citizens
gypsies can be a problem only for who live next them maybe, but they don't kill like you claim, just look at statistics
every single european country has some gypsies community, included the poorest but i bet they are not a real problem in an y european country except maybe romania and some east country where they are very big in numbers

@Mussolini14: there was this guy called dragan nicolic a gypsie from yugoslavia back then. he was a bigtime leader of gypsie gangs in western europe. in holland he started eating in restaurants and then he wouldnt pay for the food and he extorted those joints. so they once tried this turkish restaurant who was connected. you know after a while of fihgting and yelling these guys threatened to shoot them. the turks armed up and the gypsies 2 of them dragan and someone called s.nardi started spraying the joint. the turks shot them down pretty fast and killed them. the gypsie's wanted to retaliate but the bigger boys in the turkish underworld prevented this. another man claimed he shot them out of self deffence because he was ordered so by the mafia. he got a few years i think(btw here in holland murder sentences are like 10 to 15 years but some occassions lower the sentence in this case self deffence. terrorism excluded). my father was young and hanging around those place back then and he told me this. and the man who plead guilty was heavilly connected with facist-nationalist turks called the grey wolves i happen to know his son. in general turks and moroccans beat the crap out of gypsies here because they act like cowboys around them.

and for the rest of you gypsies are called roma because thats a different race in the gypsie race. to compare it see it as the italian people who speak different language's. they come from north-west india somewhere in afghanistan and pakistan. they where massacred and attacked repeatedly by turkish tribes and sometimes on bigger scale by turkish empires. this led to them escaping this area and running of east and west primarily to the west. and trough the years the nomads(turks and mongols) forced them to flee to the west where their adventures in europe started. read what i posted before about the gypsie wikipedia page that caused them to immigrate more to east-europe where they where tolerated.

in turkey there are 500,000 gypsie's and in italy 130,000 according to wikipedia. in turkey they arent hated that much they are even respected musicians and in europe they are criminals that is the thing that i dont understand. there a lot of them trying to scam tourist and a few probably pickpocket those poor tourist to but thats really all of it. i think also the main reason they arent feared in turkey is that the turks pretty much dont accept that stuff so they answer with violence on a bigger scale.

oh also the gypsie's are smart criminals. in paris they had some nice scams. one involved acting like deaf and mute. they would show you papers saying they are deaf and mute and there would be an autograph space on these papers. it said you would donate a few euro's and then you should sign the papers. here is the trick they see it when you grab your wallet than they hug you with 10 kids and take it frome where you put it in. there was this hot gypsie who ran after my friend to pull this scam but my friend was yelling at her and then those deaf and mute kids where laughing together with us and yelling at their sister and our friend. a while later she stopped and walked away . funny thing is we saw her one day later then she made fun of our friend about the way he yelled at her.

oh also the gypsie's are smart criminals. in paris they had some nice scams. one involved acting like deaf and mute. they would show you papers saying they are deaf and mute and there would be an autograph space on these papers. it said you would donate a few euro's and then you should sign the papers. here is the trick they see it when you grab your wallet than they hug you with 10 kids and take it frome where you put it in.

Whoa Meathead, a bitch be needing to pop a pill to get thru that novel you posted. Theyre gypsies, let it go.

So basically you missed my whole point. The fact is, I never denied there are criminal gypsies. I even concede that they're over represented criminally. So hate the criminals. Dont hate a whole race. And nothing for nothing, I think yigido only "apologised" in the face of all these retorts. You dont seem to understand the idea of racism. The idea of that there are inherent traits which justify discrimination. I fail to see how you guys are not being rascist when you refuse to admit there may be some "good" gypsies, because you know they are all "bad".

And as for one gypsy family in Australia, once again, my point was that wasn't just one family, there's a whole extended family comprising many family units. And these were good people, who like most other migrants, came for a better life.

And actually, I totally agrtee with m2w on this one, despite having had differences in opinions before.

Mussolini, Im not trying to diminish the fear or anger you or your sister in law felt. But if it had happened to be a black guy that had done it, would you be on here railing against black dudes? If it had been some white guy, would you be railing against "those damn crackers"? I dont think you would, but because you're so sure it must have been a gypsy, you have no problem writing them off as a people. Ask the Italian guys you mentioned, actually press them a little, and find out how many times they themselves have actually been robbed or scammed. You'll probably find that the vast majority are actually just going of things they've heard, but "know to be true!"



These are simple scams pulled the world over, by many different ethnicities. Sure some of them a deviously clever, but its not high crime. This is opportunistic.

italy is not a nation of immigration anymore, except a few doctors living the country, there are only internal emigration today from south to north italy and somebody in germany
there is only little discrimination today in some countries but nothing compared to it used to be since 1930s to 1970s in germany, swiss, france, belgium etc...
that's because the huge immigration from italy is ended in the 70s

C'mon guys and gals.... everyone chill.

Nah you're missing my point. Hate criminals. Dont hate the people. Period. Said criminals should face the full brunt of the law.

Beyond that, I detected a change in tone in that last post. I think I sounded like I was attacking you personally. As you know, discussion can get heated. You're a good guy, I like your posts here and on RD, and we've had some good discussions. As far as your own views, they're exactly that. Your own views. You're as welcome to them as I am. But to write off an entire race is just wrong, and I stand by that.

Once again, I never said there was not a criminal problem there. But you rope off the mafia and Italians despite a portion them being criminally inclined and yes, raising their kids to be criminals. I know you're fully aware of the familial structure of the Calabrian mobsters, and to a lesser extent the others. The problems related to OC and LCN has come before parliament in Canada too. Does that mean that its so bad we must all hate Italians?

And for the record, no I dont know much about the situation in Northern Italy beyond, like you, what Ive read. But statistics never paint the whole picture, and every culture needs their scapegoat. To wit; Italy has the gypsies.