The Rom are the European Union’s most numerous minority but in the continent’s affairs their presence has been entirely overlooked. True: the anti-gypsy persecutions that bloodied western Europe have been widely condemned as has their slavery in some countries of South-East Europe. But at the same time, their struggle to maintain a distinctive and strongly connoted identity has been generally misunderstood and their establishment in many local contexts either unknown or underestimated. Both immersed and dispersed in the history and geography of Europe, in the midst of other populations and within states that have risen and fallen, the Rom have built by themselves their own identity and ‘Europe’. A geo-history written entirely in modern times, but equally entirely absent from the books whose task it is to elucidate that history.