In April 2002, Italian Santino Spinelli became a senior lecturer in the chair for Roma culture and language at the Trieste Faculty of Arts. He is the first Rom in Europe to have reached such a high position in the academic hierarchy. He is an exception among the Roma, not only for being a university graduate who majored in foreign languages and contemporary literature, but an exception among the Roma for even being literate. Under his stage name Alexian, he is above all a musician, poet and composer who is about to take his second university degree, this time in musicology, at the Department of Music and Performing Arts at the University of Bologna.

Spinelli is a lecturer in History, Language and Culture of Roma communities, and is also the first lecturer who has not only been studying and documenting the "Roma issue," "the Roma problem," and "the problems of the Roma," but is himself a Rom. He descends from the oldest group of Roma who came to Italy from Greece in the year 1300. "The professorial chair compensates for an unjust law. Italy, in fact, acknowledges 14 language minorities, including the 800-member group of the Cimbri [descendants of Bavarian tribes living in the Veneto region -- author's note], and yet it does not recognize the Roma as a minority, although there are 120,000 of them living in Italy today. The chair in Trieste denotes the moment when the language of a certain minority is acknowledged," Spinelli reassures us.

Some hundred students, who chose, in the middle of the academic year, to add Spinelli's course to their curriculum as part of their intercultural studies, do not know anything about the Roma people in Italy. "Many of them have never met a Rom in their life -- what they know is only a stereotype of the Roma people which pushes us away. So far we have mostly been a subject of study, now we are going to teach the subject," is how Spinelli describes his mission.

In the text by journalist Sasa Petejan, senior lecturer Spinelli talks of the history of the Roma, which has up until now, been defined and written only by observers of the Roma, of study literature and of the origin of the word "Roma," of an ethnic transnational group that has its origins in northern India and today represents 12 million people. He also tackles the politics of assimilation, the Roma family, the Cagge (the non-Roma) and the negative stereotypes of the Roma people, the Roma with particular regard to the Roma mendicancy and their role in the Holocaust. He shares his thoughts of the Roma people who are forced to live outside social boundaries, and of those who have assimilated. He talks about the acknowledgement of the Roma as an ethnic minority, social co-existence, a multicultural school, and the rejection of pedagogical assimilation. He speaks about finding the way to make the Roma active subjects of the majority society, the paternalism of the non-Roma, and also about pseudo-Roma groups promoting gypsy culture, which are sadly failing in their attempt to carry out their mission, but rather continue to preserve the stereotypical image of the Roma.