From the road which winds along the Brezoi valley, in the central Carpathian Mountains, a rocky and muddy path splits away. A dilapidated wooden signpost indicates the “village” of Valea Lui Stan. A horse and cart passes with an entire family aboard. A group of children run to meet you, asking you for photos and bani, money. A few dogs roam freely, the hens scratch about outside the coops. Along the mud track stand dozens of wooden houses, with enormous cauldrons on open fires. Women in headscarves and ankle-length skirts wash clothes by hand, in water drawn from a well, in large tubs set up in the garden. In the village “square”, a pig with its throat slit lies on a burning pyre: the children observe enthusiastically, waiting for the beast to be butchered. This could be an image of nineteenth-century farm life, if it weren’t for the fact that all the houses have satellite dishes, TVs and DVDs. And that the place in question is a gypsy village in modern-day Romania. Rather, the Roma village par excellence: a “gypsy reservation” created in the days of communism, but which still today showcases the life led by hundreds of thousands of Roma in this country. A different world, which in practice has no relations with Romanians.
 
The reservation. The Valea Lui Stan enclave owes its origins to an idea of Nicolae Ceausescu at the end of the Seventies. The "conducator" did not want to rub shoulders with the gypsy communities who lived on the road between Bucharest and Sibiu, along which the dictator often travelled with foreign dignitaries. Hence, Ceausescu organised a mini-deportation of the gypsies from the zone creating the reservation of Valea Lui Stan. Confined in a secondary valley, along a stream a few hundred metres from the main road, the gypsies would not have been a nuisance. That community of nomads remained there, its numbers swelling over the years: today it comprises some 150 families. This means, considering the local customs, more than a thousand people. Half-way through adolescence, in fact, the girls in Valea Lui Stan are already old enough to marry. Often of the same age, sometimes a few years older. At twenty years of age it is not unusual for a woman to have three children.
 
Life in the village. In Valea Lui Stan the women wash clothes in the stream. Created after the evictions of Ceausescu, the village stands on land donated by the vice-mayor of the nearby town; nothing, however, is stopping him from taking it back one day. The Valea Lui Stan community, differently from other, all but atheist, Romany groups, belongs to the Pentecostal faith. Masses are held in a one-roomed house, a simple table as an altar for the officiant. The “Mayor” of Valea Lui Stan is a man who has been the village head for the last 26 years. Judging by the house (in brick) of the community leader, it is a lucrative position: his dwelling is the only one with running water and double glazing to insulate better against the cold, which in winter can drop to 25 degrees below zero. 

Between past and modernity. The life of the gypsies in Valea Lui Stan is in some ways very old, and in others, absolutely open to modernity. The women are specialised in producing objects in wood and wickerwork. The most common means of transport is the horse-drawn cart, but some people have cars. The hand-washed clothes, meals cooked on open fires outside the houses, the lack of running water and hygiene facilities are a characteristic of the village, as is the stream which doubles as a latrine and rubbish tip. But, thanks to ingenious home-made connections to the lamp posts, the homes have electric power and even satellite TV. And in the elementary and middle school along the main road, founded thanks to a Caritas project in Bucharest and foreign contributions, the classes seem basic. Except you discover, on the first floor, a computer room that many Italian institutes can only dream of: brand new computers, all with Internet connections. “When we created the school, after a month the kids had destroyed everything”, recalls rev. Alexandru Cobzaru, the head of Caritas in Bucharest. “But then the community understood the value of education for the children, and now they behave well”.

Communication breakdown between Romanians and Roma. The little school, with eight classes for two hundred children, shows how 21 million Romanians and 500 thousand Romany can live together. But it is a rare case: in Romania, like in other East European countries, the two worlds are virtually separate. Romanians abroad hate being associated with Roma when the newspapers and TV lump them together as responsible for theft or acts of violence. The country has several villages inhabited exclusively by tzigani, as the Romanians disparagingly call the Roma. In the capital Bucharest, the gypsies live in run-down houses in the outskirts – not in caravans, as the average Italian thanks – or they squat empty apartments in the poorest zones. The city-centre quarter of Lipscani, a survivor of Ceausescu’s bulldozers and the most old-fashioned part of Bucharest, is to all intents and purposes theirs. Perhaps also for this, it was allowed to go to ruin and it is only now that its restructuring is being considered, which would make it into a little jewel in a city where tourists are, for now, unknown creatures.
 
Planet gypsy. “Do not go through Lipscani at night, it’s dangerous”, the Romanians tell you. Groups of tzigani can mug you, or worse, in the dark streets and the many abandoned houses. Then you go and the gypsies insist on your giving them bani, but finally they might pose for you, asking you to make them a family album. Many of them are unemployed and under-educated. In the capital many municipal road-sweepers are gypsies, itinerant flower sellers and scrap-dealers, roaming the streets of Bucharest in the morning with their cries of “old iron, new iron”. And, at least according to popular belief, looking for something to steal. Ask any Romanian what he thinks of them. Nine times out of ten, he will answer with a typical phrase: “The Roma are responsible for everything that is wrong with Romania”.