It all had started from a lie, and ended up in a fire. A 16 years old girl living in Torino, nearby the new stadium, told her parents she had been raped by two persons and that they were probably Roms living in a camp in the same area. On december the 10th Torino’s main newspaper “La stampa” immediately published the news on the first page of its web local edition. Some verbs were in conditional form, but the title and the tone of the whole article were fully affirmative.
In the late afternoon many people gathered to march to the Rom’s camp, with the local headquarters of PD (which refers himself as a center-left party) holding the first lines of the rally. It should have been just a protest march, but the ever growing racism against Rom people turned it into an authentic pogrom, ending with the whole camp on fire. Forunately all people living in the camp had already run away, scared by the events, but all their properties have been burnt.
Impressed by this explosion of violence, the girl finally admitted that her account was completely false, and that she had just had consensual sex with a friend. The confession, at least, stopped the violence and the manhunting which was still giong on, but it came too late to save Rom’s homes.
On 11 december “La stampa” published an apologizing article, but the excuses were directed to “our readers, and most of all to ourselves”. Not a single word expressed for all the people who have lost their homes because of the newspaper’s behaviour, and many other newspapers moved the focus of the debate to the facr that probably some ultras of Juventus FC were among the leaders of the action. It seems that for Italian newspapers it is impossible to admit that in a large part of italian population lies a strong racist feeling, that the same newspapers contributed to build.
Sources
– text [it] Storify about the article from La Stampa
– text [it] An example of racism in La Repubblica
– text [it] The apologies of “La stampa”
– photo The Rom camp after the fire
– video [en] Video Inquiry from “Il Fatto Quotidiano”
Struggles in Italy 
I think it’s important to say that her parents used to submit her to frequent gynecologic examination to be sure she hadn’t had sexual intercourses: she lied to cover herself in front of the family. And that only her confession stopped the violence, till then “understandable”, if not encouraged.
It’s also frightening to see the greater italian “left” party, Partito Democratico (inheritor of Italian Communist Party), carrying forward far-right propaganda, and praxis.
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I think you have a good point here. The Italian writer Michela Murgia has analyzed this disheartening episode, linking the cultural premises of the pogrom with the obsession for “cleanliness” (including virginal one) in this article (it’s in Italian, sorry): http://temi.repubblica.it/micromega-online/tra-logica-del-pogrom-e-mito-della-verginita/. I think it’s a good read, for those who know Italian.