Selam Palace: the invisible city { 42 images } Created 28 Apr 2015
Selam Palace - The invisible city
“Selam Palace” (“Selam” means “Peace” in Aramaic) is a squatted building located on the southern outskirts of Rome. Its inhabitants, around 800, come mainly from Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, as refugees or asylum seekers; most of them are people who have been settled in Rome for more than five years, with no chance of being accepted or integrated into the social structure of the city.
The building and people living there are completely left out by the city’s own municipality and by the national government; this is one of the main problems generated by the latest immigration, care and integration policies of the Italian government, widely inadequate.
At the same time this lack of identity has meant that those refugees were never properly able to benefit from public welfare, school or health care; for many of them, access to public services is also hampered by the lack of cultural-linguistic mediators and by the complexity of the Italian bureaucracy, that very often forces them to endure endless trips through the municipality offices, located in different – and very often, so far – areas of the city.
Furthermore, the lack of health survey on these people causes deterioration of most of their pathologies, including severe chronic diseases and psychological disorders, whose seriousness is not always well understood by the patients.
This already tragic situation is worse in summer, when the continuous waves of migrants from the northern coasts of Africa increases the number of people living in the “Palace” to around 2,500, living with a scarce amount of shared bathrooms, one for every 60-70 people, in severely poor conditions. Most of them are separate foreign minors that come from Libyan refugee camps, bringing – beyond the evidences of torture and violence - diseases like scabies, severe dehydration and tuberculosis, and for whom Italy is just a crossing land to other North European countries with better immigration and integration policies and where they are often going to join their relatives.
Receiving neither support nor any chance or help to integrate themselves in the city where they have lived for years, the only way to feel at home consists for these people in staying in the “Palace”, apart from the surrounding neighbourhood, in a building not built for residential purposes, that has been repeatedly modified over the years, making it increasingly unsafe and insecure.
Being invisible to the Institutions, the Italian government, the Municipality of Rome -that simply choose to ignore their existence- and the remoteness from other districts of the city, has made the residents feel as invisible as ghosts, like “hedertena”, as Eritreans use to say.
Just one step away from our everyday life.
“Selam Palace” (“Selam” means “Peace” in Aramaic) is a squatted building located on the southern outskirts of Rome. Its inhabitants, around 800, come mainly from Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, as refugees or asylum seekers; most of them are people who have been settled in Rome for more than five years, with no chance of being accepted or integrated into the social structure of the city.
The building and people living there are completely left out by the city’s own municipality and by the national government; this is one of the main problems generated by the latest immigration, care and integration policies of the Italian government, widely inadequate.
At the same time this lack of identity has meant that those refugees were never properly able to benefit from public welfare, school or health care; for many of them, access to public services is also hampered by the lack of cultural-linguistic mediators and by the complexity of the Italian bureaucracy, that very often forces them to endure endless trips through the municipality offices, located in different – and very often, so far – areas of the city.
Furthermore, the lack of health survey on these people causes deterioration of most of their pathologies, including severe chronic diseases and psychological disorders, whose seriousness is not always well understood by the patients.
This already tragic situation is worse in summer, when the continuous waves of migrants from the northern coasts of Africa increases the number of people living in the “Palace” to around 2,500, living with a scarce amount of shared bathrooms, one for every 60-70 people, in severely poor conditions. Most of them are separate foreign minors that come from Libyan refugee camps, bringing – beyond the evidences of torture and violence - diseases like scabies, severe dehydration and tuberculosis, and for whom Italy is just a crossing land to other North European countries with better immigration and integration policies and where they are often going to join their relatives.
Receiving neither support nor any chance or help to integrate themselves in the city where they have lived for years, the only way to feel at home consists for these people in staying in the “Palace”, apart from the surrounding neighbourhood, in a building not built for residential purposes, that has been repeatedly modified over the years, making it increasingly unsafe and insecure.
Being invisible to the Institutions, the Italian government, the Municipality of Rome -that simply choose to ignore their existence- and the remoteness from other districts of the city, has made the residents feel as invisible as ghosts, like “hedertena”, as Eritreans use to say.
Just one step away from our everyday life.
