The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on the Life of Italian Mobile Peoples

This report provides an account of the research conducted in Italy and relates to the most rel-evant and evident effects of the pandemic on the lives of some families of nomadic service pro-viders (mainly Sinti fairground workers and Roma scrap metal collectors from Emilia Ro-magna). This was part of a wider research conducted within the framework of the“Re-imagining Development for Mobile and Marginalised Peoples” (ReDeMP) project (fi-nanced by the John Fell Fund at Oxford University in 2021) on the sedentist bias in developmentpolicies towards mobile peoples.What emerged from research was an explicit sedentist bias pervading housing policies towardRoma and Sinti in Italy, in the guise of the restricted access to social services as a result of thebureaucratic trap of registered residence; a more implicit sedentist bias in Italian work regula-tions, which hamper the itinerant activities of fairground workers and scrap metal collectors.