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"Bella Ciao," Italy's anthem of freedom, resistance, and sacrifice, is now being sung, in translation, by Ukrainians in their epic struggle against the horrific Russian invasion of their country. Here's a link to a Ukrainian rendition, with translated Ukrainian lyrics, posted on Facebook several weeks ago:
In 2010, Frederika Randall, a dear friend and a brilliant translator and journalist, wrote about "Bella Ciao" for this blog. "Most musicologists," she wrote, "believe Bella Ciao was adapted from a [late 19th-century] work song of the mondine, the women who worked in the rice fields of northern Italy."
Between 1943 and 1945, the song was adapted by the Italian resistance movement that helped liberate Italy from the Nazi occupation and Mussolini's Fascist dictatorship (although it's not clear it was ever sung by the Partisans). After the war it achieved world-wide circulation. The lyrics, as sung today, were first published in 1953, and the song grew in popularity in the 1960s. Some years later, it circulated within the dissident movement in Iran. The song has been covered some 25 times in Italian and in many other languages. Today it is sung in Italy on April 25, Liberation Day, celebrating the country's liberation from the German/Nazi occupation.
Here's the link to Frederika Randall's post (republished in April 2020), which focuses on a controversy that developed over students at a middle school in Prati singing a portion of the song. The post includes the Italian lyrics to "Bella Ciao" as well as an English translation.
Frederika Randall, an exceptional person, writer, and friend, died Tuesday, May 12 at her home in Rome, where she lived with her husband and loving and intellectual companion, Vittorio Jucker. Born in Western Pennsylvania, Frederika lived the last 35 years of her life in Italy. Her keen eye and judgment made her a valued public intellectual (a term she asked us not to use - you can't complain now, Frederika), publishing trenchant cultural and political commentary in The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her bio of herself here explains her life journey and also her lifetime of significant accomplishments and awards. She was a translator of the nearly-untranslatable, bringing to life authors as diverse as the 19th-century Ippolito Nievo ("Confessions of an Italian") and 21st- century Giacomo Sartori ("I am God").
In Frederika's memory, we are re-posting several of the posts--which remain popular--she wrote for RST. We re-posted "Liberation Day: The Politics of 'Bella Ciao'" just 3 weeks ago (not knowing how precarious her life was at that point) for Italy's locked-down Liberation Day. Ten days ago we re-posted her review of a Renato Guttuso exhibit. Here we re-post her 2014 review of a show at the Complesso Vittoriano featuring the 20th-century Italian artist Mario Sironi. The review illustrates everything we've just said about Frederika - her keen eye, her trenchant criticism, her lyrical writing.She will live on in our--and all her friends' and family's--memories, and in the eclectic body of work she left to the world.
You have a great artist in your midst, perhaps
the greatest of these times, and you don’t know it. Picasso, addressing feckless 20th-century Italians, was talking about Mario Sironi. It was a peculiar tribute,
coming from a man who belonged to the Communist party until the day he died. While
Sironi, on the other hand, was a believing Fascist even before 1921, when he
began working as graphic artist for Mussolini’s paper, Il Popolo d'Italia and the review Gerarchia. He even adhered to the Republic of Salò, the
German-backed Italian puppet state of 1943-45, and that was much more of a
minority camp than Fascism ever was.
For a taste of this political outlier—and yes,
great painter—I recommendSironi 1885-1961 show at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome until February 8, 2015. There
are ninety paintings, graphic works and sketches for murals neatly organized to
follow the artist’s life path: born in 1885, studies in
engineering, a nervous
breakdown, art school, meeting Boccioni and Balla, Futurism, the Novecento, bleak
urban landscapes, a brief Metaphysical phase, Fascist illustration, publicity
for automaker Fiat, an Expressionist turn, followed by the huge murals commissioned
by Mussolini for new Fascist public buildings in Milan and Rome.
Things looked bad for Sironi when the Liberation came on April 25, 1945. He took the road out of
Milan toward Como and Switzerland, like many Fascists who feared partisan
reprisals, and not wrongly. On foot, his dog on a leash by his side, Sironi was
stopped at a partisan checkpoint, and only when the poet and children’s writer
(and partisan) Gianni Rodari stepped in, was he saved from being shot. After
the war, Sironi continued painting, and the vein of melancholy that colors
everything he produced seems to have deepened into something like despair.
There was no place for a man like him in a postwar Italy where all the artists
and intellectuals were anti-Fascists.
This exhibit, the
first in Italy dedicated to Sironi in twenty years, was curated by art
historian Elena Pontiggia, who provides a very useful biographical framework to
hang the artwork on, both in a short film and the good wall quotes.
This
doesn’t quite compensate for the fact that not many of Sironi’s greatest
paintings are on
display, or that this show is much smaller than that of 1994,
which had 400
artworks. But Pontiggia does bring out a crucial fact: that
Sironi was a life-long depressive, a man of melancholy who it would seem should
have been quite unsuited to the Fascist regime’s celebration of might and
right.
Even as a young man Sironi would close himself up in his rooms, seeing
no-one, drawing obsessively. “He’ll copy a Greek head 20 or 25 times!!!” reported Boccioni (exclamation marks his). The
Futurists disapproved of antiquated art.
Urban Landscape, 1922
Yet Sironi’s most powerful
works are those that don’t celebrate Fascism, modernity, or industry. His urban
landscapes, some of them painted in the early 1920s, others after World War II, are
haunting, and haunted. When in 1922 he produced one of several paintings titled
Urban Landscape, Sironi was staying
alone in a cheap hotel in Milan, too poor to bring his new wife there to live
with him. Dusty white and brick-colored industrial buildings, a great black swath
of train track, a tiny tram and a tiny truck. The only thing that looks animate
in the composition is the lowering green and grey sky.
The Yellow Truck, 1918
In another cityscape
shown here, an ashy black truck stands immobile where two utterly empty streets
of factories and warehouses intersect. There is no life or movement in the
painting, just beautiful volumes. Once again, only the sky is alive, with big
brushstrokes of smoke and cloud.
The Yellow Truck, 1918, is another work from this period. Big
rough brushstrokes, in part painted on newsprint, it suggests a Futurist
enthusiasm for the vehicle itself that is utterly absent in urban scenes done even
a few years later.
Urban Landscape, 1920
In another urban landscape painted in 1920, a hard brown
wall hides what seems to be a construction site. Again, the night sky is
roiling overhead. Sironi is no longer celebrating the dynamism of the machine
that was Futurism’s trademark. The only thing that’s dynamic is the air. When it comes to the
work he did in the 1930s, Fascism’s heyday, the show tries to persuade us that
although he worked for the cause, his murals and wall decorations (here, sketches
for his mosaic Justice Between Law and
Force in the Milan Court of Assizes) were never propaganda for Fascism. But
like so many efforts to rescue Sironi from his politics, this doesn’t really
ring true. Fascism was not just Blackshirts and castor oil; it was a political
creed based on just the kind of myths that Sironi produced in his large
allegorical murals. They embody a kind of immobilism, an image of the best of
all possible worlds that need never change. Sironi was happy to accept those
mural commissions because he wanted to make art for the people, not for
bourgeois sitting rooms. But that, too, was a thread of Fascism.
Urban Landscape, 1922
My Funeral, 1960
After the war, Sironi
continued to paint, and there are several more gloomy cityscapes here, often
painted in a thick impasto of brown, blue and white, that are very striking. He
died in 1961, not before producing a small tempera work, My Funeral, in which a tiny hearse in one corner of the picture is
followed by a tiny handful of mourners. “Let us hope that after so many storms,
so many gales, so much bestial suffering,” he wrote, “that there will
nevertheless be a port for this miserable heart to find peace and quiet."
Fifty years later, his reputation as an artist has been largely detached
from his role as a Fascist, but you couldn’t exactly say he rests in peace.
RST attended three April 25, 2015 Liberation Day ceremonies. At 2 of them, and possibly 3 (we left before the end of the 3rd one, televised by RAI 1), the "Bella Ciao" anthem was sung. To further understanding of the importance of the song and its place in Italian culture, we are republishing a revealing 2010 piece by writer and translator Frederika Randall. Following her commentary, Randall presents the song's lyrics in Italian and English. Frederika Randall returns as guest blogger with this post, that begins with a curious but telling incident at a Rome public school. Randall has written about Italian society, the arts, literature, film and culture for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and now reports on politics for the Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale. She lives in Rome.
The G.G. Belli is a middle school in Prati, named, as state schools in Italy are, for famous men--in this case, the great 19th C Romanesco sonneteer Giuseppe Gioachino Belli. (Just about the only schools honoring famous women are those named after female saints and martyrs.) On an ordinary day, not much happens at the G.G. Belli beyond the usual stuff that happens in a school full of budding teenagers. But May 27 was no ordinary day.
The school orchestra had been invited to the Education Ministry in Trastevere, to give a special concert for several illustrious members of the Berlusconi adminstration including the Undersecretary for Education, a certain Giuseppe Pizza (I had to look him up, a former Christian Democrat politician, I learned from the Corriere della Sera, who never merited a single dispatch by the national wire service ANSA in his first forty years of service.)
And so the kids performed their program and after they had finished, they played, by way of an encore, a few bars of Bella Ciao, a rousing partisan song dear to the Italian Resistance, and a piece of music known around the world.
Bad choice.
Minutes later, the Belli’s principal was fit to be tied. She immediately dashed off a letter to the teaching staff, students and parents calling the encore rendition “a deplorable act” and suggesting it had been prompted by some unnamed adults.
So what was wrong with playing Bella Ciao?
Only a few years ago the anti-Fascist Resistance was practically sacred in Italy, for it was the resistance movement that had battled the Nazi invaders and the Fascist dictatorship and gave birth to the Italian Republic in 1946, and the constitution in 1948. But for some on the right, Berlusconi among them, the Resistance smacks of disobedience, of insurrection, of the Communist brigades among the partisans who fought Mussolini and who some once feared would inherit power after the war. Berlusconi--who regularly campaigns on an anti-Communist platform despite the fact that the Italian Communist Party was dissolved in 1991, before he entered politics—not only governs with the support of the former neo-Fascists, he has often had kind words for Mussolini, who he seems to think has an underserved bad rep. A lot of people on the right don’t like Bella Ciao. In parts of Northern Italy, where the extreme rightists-separatists of the Northern League govern, the song was banned this year on April 25, Liberation Day.
We can only guess that the Belli school principal had all these facts in mind when she chastised the kids for playing Bella Ciao. The performance had “cast a lingering shadow of discredit, placing the entire school in difficulty,” she warned. “We must never forget our duties toward our hosts,” she added, urging the parents to send letters of apology to the ministry. God knows these are grim days for school budgets, but her reaction seemed, well, a little excessive.
Prequel: In the summer of 2008 my husband and I were traveling through Montpelier, Vermont when we heard a busker playing Bella Ciao on the street. “It’s a beautiful old Italian partisan song,” the musician told Vittorio, who’s not only Italian but old enough (just) to remember the Resistance. They sang it together, Vittorio in Italian and the busker in English.
Strange to say, there is some uncertainty about the origins of the song. Although there’s general agreement on the lyrics, they do vary slightly from rendition to rendition. Those below come from Wikipedia, which also offers several English translations. Mine, below, is an attempt to provide a singable text that follows the meter of the Italian. To that end—sorry about that--some of the Italian words have been preserved.
Most musicologists believe Bella Ciao was adapted from a work song of the mondine, the women who worked in the rice fields of northern Italy, standing knee-deep in cold water, picking out tiny weeds. But recently, an amateur musical historian noticed that the melody of Bella Ciao was astonishingly similar to a klezmer song called Koilen, recorded in 1919 in New York by a Gypsy klezmer performer from Odessa named Mishka Tsiganoff. It was theorized that perhaps the song had made its way to Italy via returning Italian immigrants in the 1930s. Although an Italian origin is more likely, it does seem odd that a work song (and a stirring resistance melody) would be so melancholy, so minor key, as this one.
And now, for the good news: for the first time in many years, the National Association of Italian Partisans not only didn’t shrink in size as its members aged and died, but actually grew by some 20,000 members, many of them young people from 18-30 years of age.
So maybe there is a future for the Resistance after all.
Bella Ciao [this version is devoted to the Iranian dissidents]
Una mattina mi son svegliato,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Una mattina mi son svegliato,
e ho trovato l'invasor.
O partigiano, portami via,
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
O partigiano, portami via,
ché mi sento di morir.
E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E se io muoio da partigiano,
(E se io muoio sulla montagna)
tu mi devi seppellir.
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
E seppellire lassù in montagna,
(E tu mi devi seppellire)
sotto l'ombra di un bel fior.
Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
Tutte le genti che passeranno,
(E tutti quelli che passeranno)
Mi diranno «Che bel fior!»
(E poi diranno «Che bel fior!»)
«È questo il fiore del partigiano»,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
o bella, ciao! bella, ciao! bella, ciao, ciao, ciao!
«È questo il fiore del partigiano,
(E questo è il fiore del partigiano)
morto per la libertà!»
(che e' morto per la liberta')
--Anonymous
And here, in English is that “beautiful old Italian partisan song”
Early one morning, as I was waking
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
Early one morning, as I was waking,
I found the foe was at my door.
O partigiano, please take me with you
Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
O partigiano, please take me with you,
For something tells me I must die.
If I should die then, as a partigiano,
If I should die in the hills, in the hills up there,
If I should die then, die in the hills there,
Then you must dig for me a grave.
Up in the hills there, dig me a grave then,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella cia, ciao, ciao,
Up in the hills there, lay me to rest there,
There in the shade of a flowering tree.
So all who pass by, so all who pass by,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
So all who pass by, so all who pass by,
Will see a splendid flowering tree.
The flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,
The flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
Who died so all may now be free.
It’s the flower of freedom, of the partigiano,
Who died so all may now be free.
Bear with me; I'll get to the party after "due parole" ("2 words" - I'm being a bit ironic, because in Italian for us that usually means the speaker is about to launch into a long discourse). Let me first set the stage a bit.
For non-Italians and others who many not recall, April 25 is Liberation Day in Rome, a date - in 1945 - selected by the state to celebrate the liberation of Italy from the Germans. Rome was liberated earlier, June 4, 1944, as the Allies moved up from the South, driving the Germans north.
"In the social fight, LIBERATION!" (One can see why Salvini might not have liked this.)
As Bill pithily and eloquently explained in a 2009 post, it's also a contested day, because the right-wing doesn't want to celebrate a day which communists, the Jewish community, and heirs of partisans see as theirs. Not much has changed in 10 years.
That contestation continued this year, when the Deputy PM and leader of the right-wing, anti-immigrant party the Lega, Matteo Salvini, declared he would not show up at any Liberation Day events, because, as he said, "On April 25 there will be parades, partisans, anti-partisans, fascists, communists, reds, blacks, and greens, blues, yellows, reds. We are in 2019, I am not interested in the fascist-communist derby...." (He chose instead to go to Corleone, a Mafia-infested town in Sicily to show (off) that his government was combating the Mafia.) Comparing the liberation of Italy from the Nazis to a soccer game - a "derby" is a soccer tournament that pits the two biggest rivals against each other - is trivializing it, to say the least. Very clear echoes of "there are fine people on both sides." (For a discussion of the right-wing brazenness and the dangers of indifference, see Roger Cohen's op ed in the NYT.)
A very short 2 blocks from our door we found, instead of the usual sleepy enoteca (think 'wine bar') with 1 or 2 customers, this crowd, live music,
lots of emptied wine and beer bottles.
This year the turnout on the left seemed especially high, and, the Jews and the partisan organization (ANPI - Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia) marched together. They had not in the recent past because (as I recall) of ANPI's support for Palestine. (For more on Liberation Day, see Frederika Randall's excellent post on the partisan anthem, "Bella Ciao.") Almost all our friends in Rome participated in the day in some way. One took his granddaughter to lay flowers at the Fosse Ardeatine, the caves where more than 300 Italian men were summarily executed by the Nazis in retaliation for a partisan bombing that killed 33 German soldiers in March 1944. (Here is a post on the Fosse Ardeatine, which is also in an itinerary in our book.)
"The future is now; it's time to act" (and something about "big projects
for the environment") - slogan and picnic.
Leave it to the Left to be intensely political and also to enjoy themselves. The neighborhood we chose to live in this year is without doubt a leftist one. Bill is collecting slogans and posters and will post them at some point. I've included a few here that were put up for the street celebration.
Posters advertising the party; graffiti protesting gentrification.
The red flag in the distance is an ANPI flag.
A prize ceremony, showing the ethnically-mixed neighborhood. Not sure
what the prizes were for. The "prize" was a red ANPI neck scarf.
Basically our 2019 Liberation Day story is that we decided to walk out our door the evening of April 25 and within 2 blocks were in the midst of an enormous street party. Pigneto was celebrating Liberation Day as perhaps only Pigneto - a mixed social class and ethnic neighborhood with leftist roots going back to Pasolini - can. The photos and captions above and below illustrate the day. Dianne
Bars popped up where none had been before. Musicians too.
Those open store fronts to the right are bars without any signage that
haven't been open before while we've been here, and may not be again.
One wonders if they are licensed, legal, etc. But, hey, it's Pigneto!
Again, a street near us, usually quiet, now spilling over with customers,
and, yes, it's a car-driving street.
There were games - foosball, ping pong - babies, dogs, you name it.
Basically a message to the governments of Rome and Lazio (the province in which Rome sits):
"Over our territory, we will decide!"
We've been writing this blog for more than eight years, but it remains surprising--no, astonishing--that we have managed to produce 700 posts. Yes, 700! If you figure it takes about 8 hours of work to produce one post (some are less, some much more--like days), that amounts to 5600 total hours spent making content. That's like having a 40-hour-a-week job for almost 3 years. Yikes!
To celebrate our 700th, we're offering links to some of our most popular posts (those with the most page views, and some others with lots of traffic). Click on the link to see the original post.
Richard Meier's Jubilee Church. The all-time page-view champ at over 15,000. A ways out of town, but worth the trip. #17 on RST's Top 40.
Europe's Largest Mosque--in Rome. We may have a lot of Muslim readers, but the building is quite something no matter what religion you are. Also on RST's Top 40 - at #24. Interestingly, a post we did on Rome's Kebab was also widely seen.
Riding a Scooter in Rome. Actually, RST's post on renting a scooter in Rome was somewhat more popular, but this one's more useful--lots of hard-earned tips about riding a scooter in Rome, should you decide to do it, which you shouldn't.
Italy's Liberation Day: Bella Ciao. Guest blogger Frederika Randall pulls apart the legendary anthem and examines the history of "Bella Ciao."
Tracking Elizabeth Taylor. ET spent some time in Rome, some of it with Richard Burton, while she was making movies. She's still iconic here, but perhaps less so than Audrey Hepburn, whose image is everywhere.
The 1960 Rome Olympics: An Itinerary. There's lots to see in Rome related to the 1960 Olympics: the Olympic Village; the Palazzetto dello Sport, where Cassius Clay made his name and reputation; an amazing stadium built by Mussolini where the athletes warmed up.
Garibaldi in Rome. The darling of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi fought the French on the Gianicolo and lived to tell about it.
Via Tasso. To most Romans, via Tasso means "place where the Germans imprisoned and tortured their political enemies," or something like that. It's not far from the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, and you can visit, even walk into the cells and read the messages prisoners scrawled on the walls. RST Top 40, #3.
On St. Paul's Path. Cities have their "named saints," saints special to the city. Rome has two: Peter and Paul. Paul brought Christianity to Rome, and was martyred just outside the city. You can visit the sites and try to feel his presence.
It would nice to claim that we've been writing this blog longer than Jon Stewart hosted the Daily Show. Unfortunately, it's not true. Stewart's first show was January 1999, and RST didn't premier until February 17, 2009. We're disappointed, to be sure. But it's reassuring to know that we've been "on" almost as long as Hannity (no, we don't watch), andlonger than Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Parks and Recreation, Castle, Glee, and The Good Wife. 2429 days.
The occasion for all this self praise is our 600th post, an average of one every 4 days, roughly. It has helped to have Rome as our subject city, rather than, say, Keokuk or Kankakee (in the words of an old song, no insult intended--we're from Buffalo, after all). To paraphrase a Rome friend, whenever we wonder what to write about, or think we may have finally exhausted the city's possibilities, we just walk outside.
To celebrate our longevity and persistence, we thought we would offer our readers a few blasts from the past, links to posts they may not have seen when they first appeared, but have witnessed large numbers of page views over the years (in this context, "large" means more than, say, 500 hits--sometimes much more). You could find these, we know, by using the site Search button, or through a Google search, but you probably didn't, or won't. Besides, we've done some winnowing.
Here are 11 we think you'll enjoy. And thanks for your support! Now if Hannity would only get fired.
Regular
readers of these pages are familiar with the remaining
reminders of the Fascist era in Rome, of which the Foro Mussolini/Foro Italico,
the grand complex of EUR, Luigi Moretti’s House of the Italian Fascist Youth (l'ex GIL in Trastevere),
the Ostiense Post Office on Via Marmorata, the University of Rome, the Via dell’Impero, and what
was once the Ministry of Corporations (improbably on Via Veneto) are only the
most prominent (see links at end).
Public Housing in Trionfale
Less well
known are the sites of resistance to
Fascism.They were all, at the time,
areas of the city populated by and identified with the city’s working class,
students, and youth.Two—the near-in “suburbs”
of Trionfale and Garbatella—were the sites of major public housing developments
built or completed under Fascist auspices.
Garbatella is one of the itineraries in our new book, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler; see below for more information.
One of Mario Mafai's "demolition" paintings, late 1930s
Significantly, these “projects” (to use the American term) housed many
families that had been driven from the central city when their living quarters
were razed to make way for the broad avenues favored by Mussolini and other
Fascists. Artist Mario Mafai, whose own family was forced from the Monti quarter by the demolitions (in Italian, sventramento/tearing down), did a series of paintings on the subject.
The Red Hotel, Garbatella
In
Garbatella, four of the largest buildings, including the famous and
still-standing Albergo bianco (white hotel) and Albergo rosso (Red hotel) now
and then served as detention centers for communists and others deemed dangerous
to the state.When Hitler made his one
and only visit to Rome in 1938, potential dissidents were rounded up and brought to the “hotels,”
where they were placed under police guard.The hotels also housed ex-prisoners returning to Rome after
incarceration elsewhere.In addition, living
conditions in the hotels contributed to anti-fascism.Residents not only resented being forced out
of their former neighborhoods, but also dislikedhaving to leave their own furniture behind for
the iron tables and chairs provided by the complexes.
Anti-fascist graffiti on Garbatella's old marketplace,
2009 (now being renovated)
Moreover, the great majority of the men living in the new housing in Garbatella were
proletarians--ordinary, poorly paid workers struggling to keep their jobs and
feed their families under the difficult conditions of the worldwide Great
Depression. These workers were
especially vocal, and most likely to incur the wrath and intervention of the
police, as May 1—Europe’s labor day—approached.In 1943, with Fascism disintegrating
and the city occupied by the Nazis, some 270 of the most disaffected—from the working-class
neighborhoods of Ostiense, Testaccio and San Saba, as well as Garbatella--formed
a resistance organization with like-minded anti-fascists. Even today Garbatella is known as Rome's most socially progressive neighborhood.
San Lorenzo
But it was
another working-class quartiere, this one to the north of the Centro, and close
in, that caused the Fascists the most trouble.San Lorenzo was a dense neighborhood
of narrow streets, just the sort of place that the Fascists imagined was full of
left-wing troublemakers.In this case
they were right.In 1921, the year before the March on Rome, the Fascist
Party congress came to the city, and some 30,000 blackshirts roamed the
working-class sections of the city, bashing heads—especially in San Lorenzo—in
what proved a deadly effort to keep dissidents in line. The following year, according to historian Paul Baxa, the arrival in the city of the remains of Enrico Toti, a hero of the
Great War, killed on the Carso and a Fascist icon, brought another
confrontation in San Lorenzo.As the
procession with Toti’s body moved along Via Tiburtina, through the heart of the
district to the nearby Verano cemetery, anti-Fascists fired from windows and
alleys.Five months later, in the epic
March on Rome, a unit of Fascisti, heading west and south on Via Tiburtina and warned to
stay out of San Lorenzo, entered the area anyway and again faced fire from San Lorenzo’s
socialists, communists, and anarchists.
The center of the University of Rome, built,
so the story goes, on the ruins of San Lorenzo. The
sign in the foreground advertises the Rome version
of the "Occupy" movement (October 2011)
After the
second of these events, an angry Mussolini announced in the newspaper Il Popolo that “all obstacles [to Fascism]
will eventually come down.”Not even
Mussolini could tear down all of San Lorenzo, but he came close, or so the
story goes.In the 1930s the regime tore
down most of San Lorenzo that lay to the northwest of Via Tiburtina for its new
University.Although Mussolini was
capable of such venality, we’re just a bit skeptical, if only because our
early-20th century map of the area destined to house the university
shows it to be nearly empty of buildings. Another site, not visual but oral, is the resistance anthem, Bella Ciao.
And for more on Garbatella and Fascist architecture in Rome,
see our new print AND eBook, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the
Curious Traveler. Along with the tour of Garbatella that includes the Red Hotel and the old marketplae, Modern Rome features three
other walks: the 20th-century suburb of EUR, designed by the Fascists; the
21st-century music and art center of Flaminio, along with Mussolini's Foro
Italico, also the site of the 1960 summer Olympics; and a stairways walk in
classic Trastevere.
This
4-walk book is available in all print and eBook formats The eBook is $1.99
through amazon.com and all other eBook sellers.
See the various formats at smashwords.com.
Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler now is also available in print, at amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, independent
bookstores, and
other retailers; retail price $5.99.
