KEY POINTS:
Italy has found itself in the eye of a storm over its treatment of gypsies, who are being targeted by authorities facing a public worried by crime and insecurity.
Human rights critics say Silvio Berlusconi's Government is breeding xenophobia and encouraging violence, and Jewish activists have drawn a
parallel with the Mussolini era, when Jews were registered and persecuted.
Photos of a pair of drowned gypsy girls on a beach near Naples sparked handwringing last week at home and fierce criticism elsewhere in Europe.
The pictures showed Italians, sunbathing and talking on mobile phones, in apparent indifference as the two teenagers, their corpses covered in beach towels, lay stretched out on the sand while coffins were brought up to remove them.
"These images of our city are worse than those of Naples' garbage crisis," said the Archbishop of Naples, Crescenzio Sepe, while the Independent of London headlined: "The Picture That Shames Italy." The photographer who took the pictures says some people on the beach had tried to save the girls - two others were brought safely to shore - and others were clearly concerned about the incident.
Tensions rose last year after a Roma was accused of murdering an Italian woman in Rome, and this was followed by several assaults and firebomb attacks on Roma camps.
Berlusconi promised a crackdown during his campaign for the parliamentary elections in April. His rightwing coalition appointed a taskforce to deal with the Roma "emergency".
One measure has been to initiate fingerprinting of people living in the squalid camps on city outskirts.
The European Parliament, in a 336-220 vote, passed a resolution this month calling on Italy to scrap the scheme, "an act of discrimination based on race and ethnic origin".
The United Nations has also intervened. Its special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diene, its independent expert on minority issues, Gay McDougall, and the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, Jorge Bustamante, say Italy has stoked a "climate of anti-Roma sentiment" that has nourished extremism.
"By explicitly associating the Roma to criminality, and by calling for the immediate dismantling of Roma camps in the country, these officials have created an overall environment of hostility, antagonism and stigmatisation," they said two weeks ago.
Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, of the anti-immigration Northern League, says the fingerprinting is targeted only at people without documents, living in illegal camps in Rome, Milan and Naples. He says the aim is to track down children stolen from other countries and punish parents who send their child out begging or commit crimes.
He is proposing that all Italian citizens be fingerprinted from 2011 under a national ID scheme. Thus, in his view, the "census" is not biased against Roma, but simply a locally focused crime prevention measure.
Nedo Fiano, a Holocaust survivor and Jewish intellectual, said he was dismayed when the authorities launched their census in Milan last month, where many inhabitants had Italian citizenship. "When I hear a story like that, I see myself wearing that Auschwitz uniform once more."
Amos Luzzatto, former president of the Unions of Jewish Communities in Italy, said: "The way gypsies are treated these days reminds me of my childhood under the Fascist regime."
Between 90,000 and 110,000 Roma live in Italy, says the Council of Europe, although press reports have put the number at 150,000 or 160,000. Many of them live near poor, working-class neighbourhoods where residents are fed up with the petty theft, burglary, begging and rubbish associated with the shantytowns.
These districts are big supporters of Berlusconi's law-and-order message and scornful of middle-class do-gooders who live far from the problem.
To human rights watchdogs, the Roma are being singled out as they are the most visible part of the problem of illegal immigration and poor integration that Italy's dysfunctional governments have failed to resolve.
Most of the gypsies come from Bulgaria and Romania, which joined the European Union on January 1 last year. That gives their nationals the right to move within the EU, although they are usually barred from residence in Western EU economies unless they have a job.
Many of Italy's illegal migrants, however, come from Africa, not the EU. Last Sunday more than 350 were picked up in flimsy boats near Lampedusa in the Strait of Sicily.
Suspicions towards Roma run high across Europe, says Eurobarometer, an EU agency which surveys public opinion. It found that 24 per cent of Europeans on average - led by Italy and the Czech Republic, where the rate was nearly one person in two - would "feel uncomfortable" having a Roma as a neighbour.
The European Commission will host a "European Roma summit" in Brussels on September 16.
NOMADIC HISTORY
The Roma are believed to have descended from people who left South Asia towards the end of the first millennium AD.
A nomadic and diverse group, they number between eight and 10 million and are concentrated especially in eastern and central Europe, according to the Council of Europe, a pan-European assembly on culture and rights.
Roma have suffered repeated bouts of persecution, peaking in the Holocaust, when hundreds of thousands were murdered by the Nazis as social outcasts.