Rome Letter: These days, manual labourer "Adrian" does not like to tell people he is Romanian. Generally, he is careful not to say much to anyone but, if asked, he now tells people he is Polish. Just at the moment, Romanians are finding it uncomfortable in Italy.
The reason, of course, for their discomfort was the flood of vitriolic anti-immigrant sentiment unleashed by the murder earlier this month of Giovanna Reggiani, a middle- aged teacher and the wife of an Italian navy officer who was attacked, raped, brutally beaten and left for dead as she walked home from a suburban train station at Tor di Quinto, close to Rome.
Shortly after the killing, a Romanian of Roma origin, Nicolae Mailat (24), who lived in a shanty town close to where the killing took place, was arrested and charged with the murder. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, such was the wave of public anger that the centre-left government, led by former European Commission president Romano Prodi, passed an emergency decree allowing authorities to swiftly expel EU foreign nationals if they were deemed a threat to public health or safety.
For some days, the atmosphere turned ugly. Gianfranco Fini, leader of right-wing Alleanza Nazionale and until last year foreign minister in the centre-right government led by Silvio Berlusconi, said that the Roma considered "theft basically legitimate and not immoral".
Roma men, he added, had no wish to work, leaving it to their womenfolk "who do so, often by prostituting themselves".
In an interview with Corriere Della Sera, Fini went on to say that Roma men had no qualms about sending out children (of their own or kidnapped) to rob. By way of conclusion, he said that to "talk of integration with people with a culture of that sort is pointless".
Such talk reflected a public opinion aware that the million-strong Romanian community in Italy is responsible for a disproportionately high amount of crime.
Even Rome mayor Walter Veltroni pointed out that Romanians were responsible for 75 per cent of serious crime, including murder and rape, in the Rome area in the first nine months of this year.
Unfortunately, similar statistics apply to other major urban centres such as Milan, Turin and Genoa and, even more unfortunately, not everybody chooses to differentiate between ordinary Romanians and the Roma community.
In the first week after the introduction of the decree, shanty towns at Tor di Quinto and elsewhere were torn down and more than 80 Romanians were repatriated. Such was Romanian concern about the possibility of mass expulsions that Romanian prime minister Calin Tariceanu made a hurried visit to Mr Prodi, offering his full co-operation and at the same time receiving assurances about freedom of movement within the EU.
For there's the rub - the number of Romanians in Italy has greatly increased, if not doubled, since last January when Romania joined the EU. In effect, Romanians now have full access to Italian labour markets, leaving public opinion with the sensation that they are about to be overwhelmed by a partly criminal human flood tide.
Which is why Adrian has taken to passing himself off as a Pole. I have known Adrian almost since he arrived in Italy as a "clandestine" non-EU worker in 1999, having walked for a week through the Carso mountains between Slovenia and Friuli in northeastern Italy in order to escape border controls.
Not only is Adrian a willing and immensely capable worker, he is also as honest as the day is long. He is disgusted by the Roma and furious with that small minority of compatriots whose criminal lifestyle reflects badly on him and thousands of other honest Romanians.
Adrian would be more than willing to take an extremely hard line with serious criminals, saying that the only way to deal with people who come to Italy to steal, to run prostitution rings, to traffic drugs and indeed to kill would be capital punishment.
Like a lot of people, however, he does wonder why Italy (and in this case the Rome authorities) were so slow to deal with the burgeoning problem created by Roma encampments or shanty towns in and around the city.
For years now, one of the city's biggest and busiest bus and train stations, at Saxa Rubra, has been dominated by a gypsy camp. Where busy commuters should be parking their cars, there is an encampment of caravans and camper vans, complete with makeshift water and electricity supply systems. The atmosphere is hardly reassuring and both regular travellers and tourists can be seen tightly gripping their bags and briefcases.
Tor di Quinto, where Giovanna Reggiani was murdered, was once the home of Lazio football club and is now dominated by a major police training and organisational centre. Yet, over recent years, civic authorities have tended to turn a blind eye to the ad hoc encampments marking both areas. As indeed they have ignored those prostitutes, often clad in little more than bra and pants, who are to be found in large numbers at any time of day touting for work on the main traffic arteries into Rome.
Gheorge Popa, the head of police in Bucharest, says that on the same day last week, two cars were stolen in Bucharest while 80 were stolen in Rome. You Italians are not hard enough on crime, he says. He may have a point.
Ironically, it is Walter Veltroni who may well be called on to deal with this problem. Last month, Veltroni won a primary election to lead the new centre-left Partito Democratico (PD) in the next general election. Now if he could not solve the problem as mayor of Rome, what is to say he could solve it as prime minister?