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The Roma Pride
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.
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