More than 300 people, including around 100 children, elderly residents and people with serious health conditions, have been sleeping on the pavement outside a Rome building for nearly two weeks after a minor fire triggered their forced eviction and efforts to negotiate a permanent solution collapsed. The crisis centres on Spin Time Labs, a seven-storey former office block in Rome's Esquilino district — a diverse, central neighbourhood near the main Termini railway station — that has been occupied by grassroots housing groups since 2013 and grew into home for roughly 400 residents from more than 20 countries.

Residents were evacuated on the night of 29 July after a small fire broke out on a lower floor in an unoccupied room. Residents extinguished it within minutes, before the fire brigade arrived, and damage was minimal. Police nonetheless sealed the building and magistrates placed it under judicial seizure — one order linked to the fire and another to the property owner's long-running legal effort to reclaim it. Many residents were given no warning; some spent the first night without shoes, sleeping on flattened cardboard. A two-year-old girl fainted in a Red Cross nurse's arms on 6 August. One child has since been hospitalised with breathing difficulties. A heatwave pushing temperatures beyond 40 degrees Celsius has made conditions on the street increasingly dangerous.

Efforts to resolve the standoff through negotiation have so far failed. Rome's leftwing mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, convened senior city, church and police officials and proposed that the city purchase the building from InvestiRE SGR, the private fund that manages it, with residents allowed to return while the transaction was completed. The fund rejected the offer, citing legal obstacles and arguing that 13 years of occupation had left the building failing to meet safety standards, which it said legally barred any interim handover. Gualtieri said publicly he had