Miguel

Fiorello “Miguel” Lebbiati, 35 years old, Lucca, Italian

Miguel, Italian Roma fighting to promote another tale about Roma and Sinti. He regularly works (3-4 jobs) and collects cases of Roma integration.

Fiorello Lebbiati, known as Miguel, 35-year-old Italian, lives and works in Lucca (Tuscany). He has an eleven-year-old daughter. Now he lives with his new partner in a rented home that dreams sooner or later to buy. What’s “different” from many Italian guys? His mother is an Italian rom, his father is Sinti.

He experienced many different jobs: he worked in a family home for women in difficulty; he coordinated a Caritas project on the recovery of advanced food in school kitchens, then he worked as educator in woodworking laboratories and arts at a middle school with 21 Luglio Association. He also did an appearance in Zoolander II by Ben Stiller!

Fiorello was born in Fucecchio (FI) in 1982, and has a second name: Miguel, from Mom’s passion for Miguel Bosè. Then the family turned around with the caravan in the Tuscan provinces. His father worked a bit in black, his mother selling canovars, centers and flowers as a walker.

In the history of his family, we find many evidences of discrimination: his maternal grandfather (of montenegrine origin), a copper engraver, is one of the survivors of the Italian “Gypsy” concentration camps of the Second World War (Prignano, Toxic, Boiano, Gonars and others, all forgotten), while in the sixties his father attended special schools for solo nomads in Lucca, when pedagogy theorized that Roma and Sinti children should study in separate classrooms.

He tells: “I do not know how many schools I had to change; I was friendship with my new companions, I went home and, after lunch, they sent us away”. He also remembers an afternoon meeting with some of his friends: “At the park, to show a new martial arts move, of which I was a champion. I could not go because the police came to leave us”. But changing school meant to have many friends around Lucchesia: “I know half Lucca,” he summarizes. Later, Fiorello made evening classes and short courses in economy, animation and management groups.

Fiorello is defined as an activist, “the one who activates the world around him.” “On the one hand, he says, the awareness of the Roma and Sinti’s rights must be increased; On the other hand, little is known to my people, only negative images. He asks to tell the reality in its complexity, that of a country where Roma and Sinti are few (0.23%), half Italians, all no longer nomads, more than half the boys (40% of school age) and where only 40,000 out of 200,000 live in situations of Housing discomfort, which are shacks, containers, reception centers, or busy crumbling buildings. Most, on the other hand, do not live in the fields, but in homes, facing everyday problems like everyone else.

Only in “his” Lucca, Fiorello cites the rom boy who is graduating as a nurse, the Sinti one who opened a sandwich shop, the one who is ending paying the mortgage… In the letter, they explained they were afraid. Not for themselves, but for Italy. “Fear – they write – is that so many people gradually assimilate hatred, due to the media’s negative messages. We too, by putting ourselves in the shoes of those who do not know anything about our ancient people, would start believing and wanting no more Roma and Sinti in our Italy. And if we were children, what would we learn? Certainly, with a hateful bud in the heart so powerful and watered well every day, by greats we would not only hate them but we will be ready to kill them, not by wickedness, but to defend ourselves and defend our “Italy” from the bad and dirty Roma and Sinti”.

Finally, in 2016 he founded a cultural association called New Romalen, aimed at fostering dialogue and sensitizing people. Then, in 2017 he has been candidate for the administrative elections. Even if he did not achieved the victory, he considers this experience a good chance to help his town and he is happy to support the new Major of Lucca.