is a website dedicated to Romanian Roma families and culture and language preservation who come to Florence. It is hosted by the Associația 'Agrustic Somnacuni' ('Golden Ring' in the Romany language) in Romania and its sister Aureo Anello ('Golden Ring' in Italian) Associazione in Florence which supports the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei' and the Cimitero 'degli Inglesi' ('English' Cemetery) in Florence. It welcomes further essays, contributions, particularly from Roma.

Florence's Swiss-owned so-called 'English' Cemetery has Orthodox as well as Protestant burials. Amongst its Russian tombs in Sector D are the tombs of two Romanian nobles, Joan Kantakezin, descended from the Emperor of Constantinople, and Paul Ventura, a child, both of the slave-owning aristocracy. These tombs were impossible to visit - until Daniel-Claudiu Dumitresch built the terraced path by them. He also identified these tombs for me as Romanian. At the beginning of that path is that of Theodore Parker, the Unitarian who preached eloquently against slavery. Frederick Douglass, the formerly illiterate ex-slave, came from America and visited the tombs of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sector B)  and Theodore Parker to honour them for their work against slavery. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's other heroine in Aurora Leigh, Marian Erle, is Roma. Also buried in our Cemetery are Frances Trollope (Sector B), who wrote the first anti-slavery novel, and Richard Hildreth (Sector D), who wrote the second anti-slavery novel. Harriet Beecher Stowe copied both of them to create her Uncle Tom's Cabin. The Roma in Romania were the slaves of the nobles and the monasteries from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, when Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated into Romanian.

Our archives document these burials. Our library collects these books.



Van Gogh, Gypsy Caravans. When Roma lived in these they did not get TB, in crowed social housing they do.

As were Black slaves in America, the Roma in Romania are kept in illiteracy. They may not legally work unless they have a decent and registered house and the diploma. Lacking work, they cannot afford the materials for their roofs or the payment to the schools for heating and books. They come to Florence, where again they may not work from lacking a legal address, and beg in the streets annoying tourists and citizens. They have no country, no army, no power. They came from India a thousand years ago and speak an Aryan language. Their flag is green for the earth, blue for the sky with a red wagon wheel. They are no longer allowed their traditional caravans. But I have found that they are skilled and excellent craftspeople, both women and men, as blacksmiths, stonemasons, carpenters and gardeners. They restore the 'English' Cemetery, repairing and cleaning its tombs under expert supervision, and planting and weeding its garden. To teach literacy they are encouraged to explore the books in the Mediatheca, like the intermediate technology shown in the engravings of Diderot's Encylopedie, to marble paper and to hand-bind books, and to use the computer. Daniel-Claudiu Dumitrescu, who has the diploma, writes booklets in four languages, Romanì, Romanian, Italian and English, with his drawings, on how to rebuild roofs, with drainage for storing water and with solar panels for electricity, which are placed on this website. Daniel has also conserved all the nineteenth-century cast and wrought iron work in the Cemetery and built the shelving for the Cemetery's Swiss archives, many of the library's bookshelves, and many wooden rocking cradles, one for his own new-born daughter, another for the Cemetery's library, where it mirrors photographs on the walls of Roma families, one of which shows such a rocking cradle with a child asleep in it. I have said on Easter Day on Rai Uno (Italian national television) that to bring Roma into a library is to bring them into the world of the book, to give them literacy. In this library we teach Roma how to sign their names, so they may become members of our Aureo Anello Associazione, and the alphabet. With that membership it is legal for them to work for us. We have formed a sister association in Romania of which Daniel is President which is called Asociația 'Agrustic Somnacuni' (like 'Aureo Anello' meaning 'Golden Ring') and whose mission is to preserve Roma families and the Romanì language with mutual help in roof building with drainpipes and windows and with schooling for adults as well as children.

These are the relevant essays on the Ring of Gold website:

     

Apartheid/Inclusion

Apartheid/Inclusione in italiano

  This is the House that Daniel Built

http://www.ringofgold.eu/iron.ppt

http://www.ringofgold.eu/marble.ppt

http://www.ringofgold.eu/copper.ppt

http://www.ringofgold.eu/gough.ppt
 
http://www.ringofgold.eu/porteus.ppt

How to Build Better Roofs with Drainpipes for Water Storage New

Panouri Solare/ Solar Panels Romanì/Rumeno/italiano/English New

This is the House that Daniel Built English

EDUCATION
Roma often cannot afford to pay for schooling for their children in Romania. But children learn from their parents important skills useful for survival, how to work with metal, stone, wood and earth. They work collaboratively in families with great courtesy towards each other. Taking the children from their parents at an early age to teach them Gadje (non-Roma) 'socialization' and in tellecuatl skills is not necessarily the answer. In America 'socialization skills' translate into unethical competitiveness, the Orwellian opposite of what the word seems to imply. Instead there should be projects of alphabetization of all ages, for women and men, which include practical hands on information for better health, nutrition and housing, so that children are not alienated from their parents by education. Statistically it has been found that where schools are held in Romani far better retention results. At the same time attention paid to the health, nutrition and housing of young children in families results in better academic work. Ideally Roma can be encouraged to retain their traditional manual skills while learning our intellectual ones, and even teaching their excellent skills to our young people who are in such great need of them. Our own education system has divorced us from centuries of traditions of manual skills' learning and teaching and has consequently caused children to despise their parents to the point where they now cannot work manually and are afraid for their survival in our current economic collapse. We can learn much from the Roma; our children could learn to work manually, gainfully and joyfully alongside of Roma. That is how Roma work.

ALPHABETSCHOOL.ppt English

ALFABETOSCUOLA.ppt italiano

Alphabet English

Alfabeto italiano

AlfabetoBadia italiano

Alphabet Voice Recording of Romanian Roma in Mediatheca Fioretta Mazzei's Alphabet School reciting the alphabet

      
Alphabet School in Florence's English Cemetery and Library for Roma Families

School in a Bucharest cemetery, 1842, but not for Roma (who were then slaves), or girls.

Nigel Dickinson, Roma women at Helsinki University

Relevant Books in the Mediatheca 'Fioretta Mazzei', Florence's 'English' Cemetery, where we have taught Roma parents to write their names so they will not lose their children

Roma Studies:

Shelved, GIMEL:

Alla perifera del mondo: Il popolo dei rom e dei sinti escluso dalla storia. Ed. Isabella D'Isola, Mauro Sullam, Guido Baldoni, Giulia Baldini, Gabriele Frassanito. Milano: Fondazione Roberto Franceschi, 2003. With CD. Università di Firenze, 2003.

Isabel Fonseca. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey. New York: Random House, 1996. Father Matthew Naumes, 2001.

Gianni Berengo Gardin. La disperata allegria: Vivere da zingari a Firenze. Firenze: Centro Di, 1994. Paola Cecchi, Firenze, 2003.

Jean-Pierre Liégeois. Gypsies: An Illustrated History. Trans. Tony Berrett. London: Al Saqi Books, 1986. Jane and Philip Weller, Hampshire, 2003.

Le strage nazifasciste a Firenze e Provincia: Trasmettere la memoria. Catalogo della mostra fotografica 27 gennaio-10 febbraio 2002, Gallera Via Larga, Via Cavour, 7r, Firenze. Firenze: Amministrazione Provinciale di Firenze, Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana, 2002. Michele Gesualdi, Firenze, 2003.

Romano Lil 4 (2001). Roma

William M. Sloane. The Balkans: A Laboratory of History. New York: Eaton and Mains, 1914. Syracuse University, Florence, 2005.

Antonio Tabucchi. Gli Zingari e il Rinascimento: Vivere da Rom a Firenze. Firenze: Feltrinelli, 1999. JBH

Portfolio on Hedera, etc.

Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald. Gypsies of Britain: An Introduction to their History. London: Chapman and Hall, 1946. Jane and Philip Weller, Hampshire, 2003.

Shelved, ALEPH:

Duncan Williamson. Fireside Tales of the Traveller Children. Twelve Scottish Stories. Illustrated, Alan B. Herriot. New York: Harmony Books, 1983. Arizona State University/Mesa Public Library, Tempe, 2004.

Our Mediatheca in Florence will always welcome further materials concerning the Roma
 

And on the Victoria Discussion List the following suggestions were made for leads for research:

The list of material about the Victorian Roma/Gypsies is long, indeed, but it's a rich and fascinating topic.  If you want contemporary accounts, the second half of the century saw the advent of the "Gypsyologists."  You might start with The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society.  It started in 1888, I think.

You might also look at some of the individual C19 Gypsy Scholars/Scholar Gypsies like George Borrow (The Zincali [1841], Lavengro [1851], and The Romany Rye [1857]), Richard Burton (The Jew, The Gypsy, and El Islam [1898]), Francis Hindes Groome, Charles Godfrey Leland, et al.

For more recent examinations of the "Gypsy Problem" in the century, see David Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) and Gypsy Identities, 1500-2000:  From Egipcyans and Moon-men to the Ethnic Romany (London: Routledge, 2004); George K. Behlmer, "The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England," Victorian Studies 28 (1985): 231-53; Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, Gypsies of Britain:  An Introduction to Their History (London: Chapman & Hall, 1944); Thomas Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change:  The Development of Ethnic Ideology and Pressure Politics among British Gypsies from Victorian Reformism to Romany Nationalism (Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1974).

The book-length studies are quite good and offer longer, more nuanced considerations, but if you want a shorter and quite informative introduction to the subject, the Behlmer article is a fine place to start.

The past 10-15 years have also seen a handful of doctoral dissertations on the subject, including those by Audrey Shields, Michelle Mancini, Mary Burke, and myself.

I don't think it's out yet, but Deborah Nord's Gypsies in the British Imagination, 1807-1930, is listed as forthcoming this year from Columbia UP (I think), and based on an excerpt I heard her read at NAVSA, it promises to be intriguing.

Lance Wilder, Victoria List

And Gipsy Smith, His Life and Work (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901). was also suggested. While the discussion list went on to mention Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Marian Erle in Aurora Leigh, Robert Browning's Pied Piper, George Eliot and Matthew Arnold.
 

© Nigel Dickinson

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