KEY POINTS:
They sat forlornly on the banks of the Tiber while the shantytowns they had called home only hours before were demolished.
Already outcasts from the mainstream of Italian life, now they have been banished from whatever impromptu shelter they had found.
And the city rejoiced at their misfortune. Three small kittens and a hungry-looking mongrel are the last remaining inhabitants of the Roma squatter camp on the northern outskirts of Rome.
The camp is metres from Tor di Quinto station on a commuter line from central Rome, screened by trees and creepers. Beyond appears the first of a line of flimsy huts, put together from scrap wood and fabric and cardboard but neat and cared-for.
Inside, some of them have rugs on the floor, tiny gas cooking stoves, dressers with ornaments, a double bed, a broken down chair; outside is a mouldy old sofa, a moth-eaten beach umbrella shading an old coffee table: la dolce vita for Italy's poorest and most marginal residents.
The camp is empty because on Wednesday a naval captain's wife, Giovanna Reggiani, 47, returning home from a shopping trip to central Rome, was beaten with a rock and dumped in the gully. She later died in hospital.
It was a vicious crime, and fed into a mounting national mood of anger and exasperation about immigration. Suddenly, Italy's political system, normally so sluggish, sprang into life. Within hours Italy was doing what millions of people around Europe - whipped up by populist politicians and a xenophobic media - would like to see their own governments doing: taking quick, dramatic and draconian action to teach the immigrants a lesson they won't forget.
A new law on security has been creeping through Parliament: one of its central provisions is that foreigners belonging to EU countries and resident in Italy can be expelled on the orders of local prefects if they are a threat to "public security". No trial is necessary.
On Wednesday night, at the urging of Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome and leader of a new centrist party, the Democratic Party, that provision was extracted from the law, quickly redrafted as a "decree-law", a sort of diktat, and signed by the President overnight.
From being the sluggard of the EU, suddenly Italy was in the vanguard.
"First 5000 expulsions to go ahead," promised La Repubblica newspaper. The decree law came into force Friday, and last night the Prefect of Milan became the first in the country to apply for its implementation, demanding the expulsion of four Roma.
A line of police cars arrived at the Tor di Quinto and police chased the Roma away. Forensic detectives went through the camp for clues to the murder, and it was expected that its shacks would be levelled by bulldozers within a few hours.
In Italy, as in Britain, the Netherlands and elsewhere, the issue of foreign criminals stirs a mob mentality that can quickly remove senior politicians from office.
Statistics do little to calm the debate. Analysis from London's Metropolitan Police suggests foreign migrants are if anything less likely to commit crimes than other groups. Figures suggest they made up 27 per cent of the population in London but committed 20 per cent of the crimes.
The consensus on the streets of Rome was the crackdown was long overdue. A woman on crutches at Ponte Milvio, a couple of miles from the crime scene, said baldly: "It would be better if they all went home. Here we are all scared."
The attack on Giovanna Reggiani came to light after a Roma woman stood in the middle of the road and forced a bus to stop. Unable to speak Italian, she screamed the name of the man now accused of the murder - "Mailat!" - and mimed a man carrying a body. She is now under police protection.
- INDEPENDENT
New law to expel migrants
Italy has brought in a law making it easier to expel European Union "undesirables".
EU citizens could previously be sent home only if they posed a threat to the state. Now they can be kicked out if they are "a threat to society".
The move comes amid outrage over the sex attack murder of an admiral's wife by a Romanian migrant. The change, and fears of a backlash, led to an immediate exodus of Romanians.
The ruling was rushed through on Friday after Giovanna Reggiani, 47, was beaten with a rock and her body dumped in a ditch. She died two days later.
Nicolae Mailat, 24, from Transylvania, was arrested in his hovel at a nearby gipsy camp a short while later. He had two previous convictions for theft in his home country.
Before the new laws, Italian expulsion orders were complicated. Now any EU citizen who has a conviction, is under investigation, or is deemed a threat to society, can be held. A magistrate will decide on expulsion within 48 hours and there is no appeal.
Officials in Brussels said Italy appeared to be working within EU legislation.
Romanians have been blamed for 76 murders in 18 months, half of all rapes and a surge in people trafficking and prostitution. At the same time, crime in Romania has fallen by 26 per cent.
Yesterday, camps and ramshackle homes were dismantled by police using tractors and dozens of Romanians were rounded up. Others headed home on buses.
