Disappearance of a community and social suffering: the case of a Southern Italy Roma community

Historical sources state that a ‘Roma community’ existed in Melfi (Southern Italy) at least until the beginning of the XX century, but more recent archival and ethnographic research demonstrates its disappearance, dissolution and fusion into the rest of the town community. Based on these research results, the article traces the historical events that determined the community's disappearance by questioning the relationship between structural violence and individual choices. Could the disappearance of the Melfi Roma community be interpreted as the effect of structural violence imported by the economic development of the 1960s, mass emigration, and so on, or rather as the effect of individual choices, or both? The question concerns the extent of suffering for cultural loss that the people of Roma origin in Melfi share and if it is really possible to speak about ‘social suffering’ with reference to this loss in the local context.