Coffee cups are set aside. The restaurant falls silent. Toni Deragna, a 23-year-old man with a fashionable wedge of jet-black hair and a sense of the theatrical, gets up to sing a cappella. The precise meaning of the lyrics is a mystery to many listening, but the potent mix of pride and melancholy is unmistakable.

Not everyone is as impressed as our group of 19 journalists from across Europe, gathered in Italy for a European Commission seminar on anti-Roma discrimination.

Deragna is a Roma - the term “gypsy” is now widely viewed as derogatory - but the restaurant staff had not clocked this, nor the presence of several other Roma, until he started singing traditional laments.

The next morning, an organiser of our seminar tells me the restaurant manager had confronted her. “You told us this was an EC group - you didn’t say anything about any Roma,” he complained. She finds this attitude all too predictable.

Roma have routinely been at the sharp end of humanity’s baser instincts for centuries. In the Second World War, they, like the Jews, were singled out for elimination by the Nazis.

So the sight of Roma families living in squalid, temporary camps in 2016 carries uncomfortable echoes of historical injustices. As does a sober EC briefing for our group, highlighting the countries that still build walls around any Roma settlements and sterilise the women against their will.

And education does not always provide the escape that it should. Worse, Roma children around the continent are routinely segregated into “remedial” classes on the basis of their skin colour and ethnicity.

There is no such segregation in the UK, but they have recorded educational attainment far below the national average.

“School was a disaster,” says Deragna, the singer from the restaurant, who grew up in a Milan camp where he still lives.

He noticed aged 6 that something was amiss: “There were children who wanted to play with me and others who didn’t, but I didn’t understand why.” Deragna came to believe that, while there were some “good and fair teachers who treated me like other children”, others were straightforward racists.

“I was put in a corner and separated from others; children stayed away from me,” he recalls.

‘So many difficulties’

Deragna, whose family was deported from Yugoslavia during the Second World War, gave up on his formal-education ambitions, instead becoming a Roma activist who teaches people about his culture through theatre.

“One day, when I have a family, I would like to take my son to the park and watch him play with other children and not have their parents take them away,” he says. “I want him to live without the distress that accompanied my own childhood.”

Omeila Bignami, a social worker and educator who works with Roma families, says that the camps present “so many difficulties at a logistical level”. This applies equally to ramshackle settlements like one we visit in Rome (see box, below) and established examples such as Deragna’s - he doesn’t like the word “camp” and calls his home Villaggio delle Rose, or “Village of Roses”.

Authorities do not always try hard to get Roma children to class - the school bus from Deragna’s village runs only three days a week. And even when they do make it to school, Bignami says, teachers frequently complain about the behaviour of children who are not used to sitting down indoors all the time and may know little Italian.

Bignami notes sadly that there are teachers who display outright racism and schools that will not accept Roma children, or do so grudgingly and sit them apart from other pupils. Such attitudes are widespread: nearly half of Italians in an EC survey said that they would be concerned if their child had a Roma schoolmate (see statistics, right).

“When my friends found out I was Roma, everything changed at school,” says Ivana Nikolic, 25, a dance teacher and student of philosophy and educational sciences from Turin.

Her parents had fled Yugoslavia in 1991 - they were particularly vulnerable as her mother is Bosnian Muslim and her father an orthodox Serb - and were typical of a generation that hid its Roma identity to get on in life.

Nikolic made some firm friends at secondary school but took her parents’ advice not to mention that she was Roma - classmates assumed her darker skin meant she hailed from somewhere like Sicily. After her friends found out, they ditched her and turned spiteful. When Nikolic, who has dyslexia, was allowed to use a dictionary during exams, her former friends protested and lobbied teachers to have her results invalidated.

A proud identity

Yet like many of her generation, Nikolic is loud and proud about her identity - even organising a flashmob in the centre of Turin to highlight the plight of Roma people during the Holocaust. If Nikolic ever has children, she tells me with a steely look, they will not hide that they are Roma.

Every Roma person I meet tells of thwarted educational ambitions. Bologna mechanic and father-of-three Vincenzo Spinelli, 40, says that being a lawyer or a doctor was not an option for him: “My biggest dream as a boy was to build a huge robot that could host my whole family and move us somewhere far away from the people who hated us.”

Turin youth worker Gabriella Stojanovic, 24, wanted to be a surgeon, but a teacher told her it was impossible, there was no point in her going to school and she would “end up like all the other people like you”.

Raising low expectations

But there is light at the end of this tunnel. While Roma school attendance is still poor - only 20 per cent of children go to primary school in some countries - and educational attainment way below average, the EC says today’s generation is “probably the best-educated in Roma history”. The number of Roma who are going to school and becoming highly qualified professionals is “growing steadily”.

Now, more than ever, young Roma children are proving the mantra that Nikolic’s parents lived by after fleeing war-torn Yugoslavia and enduring years of living in camps: “The only way to leave degradation is through education.”

@Henry_Hepburn