The paper focuses on the ways Italian institutions perceive and deal with the mobility of Roma and Sinti and particularly with their itinerant trading of metals in relation to the mainstream transwaste system.
In the Italian transwaste context, the discretionary power exercised by authorities, combined with regulatory silences, discrepancies between local and state provisions and the issuance of licenses have been normally used as devices of structural violence fueling inequalities and economic marginalization of Roma and Sinti communities who, due to their real or assumptive mobility, have always been perceived as naturally inclined to operate in violation of the law and so as unfair competitors.
However, a reverse trend have been observed locally (within the administrative policy framework adopted by South Tyrol in the period 2010/2015) and, despite it short life, it turned out to be successful in enhancing Roma and Sinti employment in an economic niche where they had developed a peripatetic model that was environmentally, economically and culturally sustainable and, simultaneously, of great support to the local transwaste system.
Such administrative mechanism works as a reading lens for a temporary peaceful relationship between local institutions and the Roma and Sinti as well as a reconciliation strategy between practices of (im)mobility that had the purpose of protecting the collective interest in a clean and healthy environment. In the South Tyrolean case too the bureaucrats “naturalize(d) the most arbitrary decisions and assignments” (Herzfeld 2001 p. 276) camouflaged by the homogeneous and apparently rigid regulation. They did it, however, according to political and administrative combinations that allowed the satisfaction of both the interest of the Roma and Sinti citizens (rather than the opposite) of preserving their peripatetic metals trading, and the interest of the South Tyrolean community as a whole in an effective transwaste system and so in a healthy environment.
