Liselotte Ivry’s Headscarf (A Headscarf Traded by a Young Roma Woman): This floral pattern fabric in orange, yellow, red, blue and green probably used to be a blouse or a skirt. Liselotte Ivry (née Liselotte Epstein) traded it for a loaf of bread with a young Roma woman while in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp. This young woman wore it as a headscarf. [Bergen-Belsen, 1945]
Roma Interiors. Photography project by Carlo Gianferro.
“The images of Roma Interiors allow us to enter into the intimacy of the Roma houses in Moldova and Romania, where interiors are represented with its inhabitants in order to solder the connection between the life and the lived. The people, the inhabitants and the owners were photographed quickly, without prior preparation, aesthetic tricks or any special choice of clothes: what you see is what there is, what there was at the time of the shooting, what there is every day.
Women with sumptuous traditional costumes and hairstyles that have remained unchanged over time; men who owing to their dealings outside of their community wear Western clothing; youths wearing the universal fashions of today’s youth everywhere, yet all of these sharing a common background characterized by creativity, color, splendour, and cultural tradition.
Roma Interiors is above all a real and accurate portrait of current Romani society, which is still, as it has always been, based on the family, and the house is the backdrop against which the family is represented. Money and the home are the two main parameters which show the other members of the community the importance and power of the family. In this the Roma don’t deviate from universal motivations, but they articulate it in their homes with an innate and personal expression, with the concepts of luxury, prosperity, and especially power represented by decorative overabundance.
Colours are essential to the Roma people and, as with the women’s costumes, colour covers everything, both the inside and the outside of the houses, making fantastic, unreal buildings - as fantastic and unreal as the dream, the desire of having a house, a stable place for a people that for hundreds of years has roamed far from its place of origin.
Freedom, and the intelligent use of it, has allowed the Roma community to redeem itself in the most obvious and confrontational way possible, using rocks, concrete, iron, wood, plaster, and metal to build these monuments to their desires, and into which they then move to live in a joyous, colourful, world of their own.”
photos by JEREMY SUTTON-HIBBERT, 1990
In mid-August, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his government began deporting local Roma residents, or Gypsies as they are known, to Romania and Bulgaria and demolishing their camps in response to clashes between the itinerant group and French police. This policy continues despite resistance by the international community and high-level French officials. Much of the background can be read in here and here, but what is lacking in most reports of this growing humanitarian crisis is the human portrait of the Roma people.
Roma girl, 1958, Sweden.
Happy birthday, Rome!
I’m from California if that gives you any idea of what I’m used to climate wise and I was wondering how the weather is and in turn how would you would dress in May? 🇮🇹✈️⛅️
I have been to Italy before but it was during the height of the summer heat. It was still a fabulous trip and I was able to go see where my family immigrated from, Napoli! I also went down to Palermo and explored other parts of Sicily and spent a day in Sardinia. The cruise took me next to my favorite place on earth, Venice in which I was there for a couple of days and seriously would kill to go back. Then I had the pleasure of visiting Murano and Burano during my stay in Venice. I’ve been to Rome & Vatican City for only a day which is why I am returning for almost a week. When I was in Tuscany, I had some lovely wine and cheese tasting then rushed to make a day trip to Pisa to see the leaning tower along with the most gorgeous Basilica ever. Since I barely had time to even fit Pisa into my schedule (thank G-d I did), I obviously did not have time to make it to Florence which has pained me to this day. After my last trip to the Mediterranean, I fell in such love that I decided to enroll in a Renaissance History course at Cal. As you can imagine it focused around Florence for a good portion of the course but wow the fact that I did not set Florence while in Italy killed me even more after taking that course which is why I’m so thrilled to be spending a couple of days in Florence. So dressing in Rome & Florence during May? I love you my Italian followers! If you could help me out I would love you to death and send you a shoutout and pictures and stuff while I’m there! Pretty plz! 💕
