Waiting Out the Coronavirus in Portuense

Waiting out the Coronavirus in Portuense

    
by John Preissing  (3/27/2020)

Peggy and I moved to the Portuense area of Rome in August 2019 upon our return to the city after an eight year sojourn to Latin America.  I work with United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which is based in Rome. We have three adult children, two in Chicago and one currently with her finance in Vanuatu, in the South Pacific. Since Peggy had spent all those eight years in a daily commute of an hour each way, we decided we should be closer to her school, AmBrit, where she is a Fifth Grade Teacher. So, now we are just a block away on Via Pigna and Leonardo Greppi.

 

Portuense is a middle-class neighborhood, just south of Trastevere, with many 60s era apartment buildings.  We chose the building for two reasons -- it’s close to school and it has a nice terrace – attributes which we appreciate.  It is not very touristy at all, but has nice local restaurants, is close to the Marconi shopping district, and includes the Spallanzani Hospital, which has been the center of Rome’s response to the Coronavirus.  Daily there are helicopters in and out with critical patients. 

Life in the time of Coronavirus (with apologies to Garcia Marquez) has been stressful and at times heart-warming.  As a regular classroom teacher, Peggy’s workload has surely doubled.  As the school, parents, students, and teachers cope with online education it has been a period of growth and sacrifice.

For the large contingent of FAO people in Rome, this has also been a big change.  Of the 3,500 people in the FAO Headquarters on a daily basis, there are now under 60 people.  We are getting daily

FAO serenade, a show of solidarity

reminders from those still at HQ with a nightly trumpet serenade, the FAO building illuminated with the Italian colors and flag, in a show of solidarity.  Like Peggy’s students, we have learned how to work in an online situation.  If only we didn’t have to suffer through seven Zoom meetings in a day.  I say this as someone who didn’t know what Zoom was a week ago.

Movement around the city is quite restricted.  One is supposed to go only to the grocery store, pharmacy, and the vaguely described other stores of necessity.  People should walk around with self-certification papers on their intended destination.  Failure to heed these rules now results in fines of

up to 3,000 euros. Pretty draconian for this very open city and country.  We encountered one desperate restaurant owner who said he would be providing dinners for delivery on the sly because he could not close or he would go bankrupt. Another friend, a jogger, was stopped and sent home.

Peggy and I take turns walking to our local Ma grocery store about ten blocks by foot with our grocery cart or to Tipo’s, our Bangladeshi fruit and vegetable stand a block away.  We are waiting in lines, with the required one meter of separation, to enter stores.  Actually, the stores are doing a brisk but orderly business.

Dancing nona

For the first week of lockdown, we were treated every night by an 80 year-old nona, who danced in her balcony across the street, accompanied by an accordion player.  All of us joined together by distance to enjoy her three or four nightly dances.  However, for now, the dancing has stopped as the restrictions have increased and the daily news has become more grim. Like most, we are watching the 6:00 pm news with Civil Protection where they share the daily figures on deaths, new patients, and patients cured.

Peggy's space

At home, Peggy and I have divided the house.  She has claimed the dining room, a large space where she can spread out to plan and lead all her teachings.  I’m in the bedroom.  We had to separate in order to get work done and keep the noise level down.  

Neutral staff room and Spades tourney site

We’ve agreed that the kitchen is the neutral staff room and two-handed Spades tourney site. We have also said that if coronavirus doesn’t kill us, we might kill each other.

Peggy and I have played one game, which is to pick the first five restaurants we’d like to go to once the restrictions are lifted.  Our top choices are locally, Sapori di Casa, a great pasta restaurant and MeAT, a fusion cuisine place, both  in Portuense; plus Due Sardi, a lovely seafood restaurant with good Sardinian  wines, and Ur Panonta, one of the best open garden pizzerias in Garbatella;  with perhaps Le Mani di Pasta in the Santa Cecilia area of Trastevere as our other pick.  I wonder what others would pick? 

A final point and shout out to Bill and Dianne.  We met them in a very serendipitous way years ago.  Our first landlords in Rome are their famous friends from Rome who occasionally show up in postings.  We eventually got together and have enjoyed their time and posts ever since.  A special idea we have carried from them is moving people around the table half way through dinner, so all guests mingle.  The first time was in fact at Due Sardi.  Thanks for that!

We’re looking forward to better news here.

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The Pleasures of Parioli's via Paisiello

We were living just a few blocks away from via Giovanni Paisiello, where we [thought] we had identified the location of a fine piece of mid-century modernist architecture.  We set out to find it.  All we lacked was the precise address.

Our task seemed easy.  There's not much to via Paisiello, which runs northeast (the direction we walked) for just a few blocks between Villa Borghese and viale Liegi.  Moreover, the Parioli quartiere isn't exactly loaded with great buildings; so we figured if we saw one that was worthy--and of the appropriate time period--we would have found our prey.

And there it was, at #10.  Powerful angular corner balconies.  Captivating mosaics.  Everything in need of repair, but the elements were there.  A lovely example of a species we enjoy: mid-century modernism.

These are great balconies. Pour me a
glass of Arneis!

Today it's a bank

Very 1960

Except we had the wrong building.  As we later learned, the building we were looking for--clearly the most famous on the street, was the one in the photo below, a couple of blocks further along, at #39.  At first glance (and maybe second) it's an odd duck: the bottom half is a handsome but rather traditional palazzo in the classical language common in Rome in the early 20th century.  The top half--3 + stories--is mid-century horizontal glass and metal.  Between 1950 and 1952, some part of the original palazzo was removed and, under the supervision of prominent architect Mario Ridolfi, a modern addition added.  That kind of radical surgery doesn't happen often--we can't think of another example in Rome--and that's why the building is notable. It helps, too, that the surgery was successful.  So successful that on our first trip up via Paisiello we hadn't even noticed the structure.  Ridolfi did well.

The building's reputation also owes something to the fact that Ridolfi was in the first tier of 20th-century Italian architects.  Among his buildings are the rationalist Nomentano post office in Piazza Bologna (1932), one of the 4 commissioned for Rome by the Fascist regime; a playful and architecturally significant public housing project in Tiburtino (1950-51); and the headquarters for FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), begun in 1938 as the Ministry for Italy's African colonies.

We might have considered our first effort on via Paisiello a failure, were it not for some other discoveries, all within a few blocks.  We admired the enormous cantilevered corner balconies of this otherwise ordinary apartment house:

Then there was this treasure, at first sight just another classic palazzo, this one in red.  On closer inspection, it turned out the palazzo wasn't so classic.  Indeed, it's of Fascist-era origins--1935 to be exact.  It carries a Latin inscription, some heads that reminded us of the heads that decorate one of the buildings in Piazza Independenza and, high above, a couple of elegant statues to link the building (and the regime) to ancient Rome.

Next door, and not so well cared for, another 1930s building with nice curvelinear lines, no doubt originally an apartment building but now the Hotel Paisiello.  The round side/rear balconies are exceptional.

From another era, but equally fine, at the far (northwest) end of the street.

And that's via Paisiello--or rather, what we saw of it.

Bill

FAO's Vines: a Tale of Survival

The building that houses FAO, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organizaton--is one of the least interesting of the numerous Fascist-era structures that dot the Roman landscape. Intended to be the seat of the Ministry of Italian Africa, it was designed by Vittorio Cafiero and rationalist Mario Ridolfi in 1938 and completed in 1952, years after Italy had lost its empire, such as it was.  It seems today to presage the brutalist style that was popular in the 1970s, though its enormous if spare balcony offers a fine view of Circo Massimo and elements of the Roman forum--assuming you have a friend who can get you in and up there.  

What the building does have, on the exterior walls that front the sidewalk on viale Aventino [once viale Africa], is an impressive, vigorous set of vines.  Yes, vines.  They're thick and primordial in appearance, deriving nourishment from somewhere beneath the asphalt pavement that's [unfortunately] everywhere in Rome. They may even date to FAO's arrival in 1953.

For us they stand for resilience.  Although we have been by the building many times over the years, we first noticed the vines in mid-April, while on a tour--rather disappointing, as it turned out--of the remaining vestiges of Italian colonialism.  They had been trimmed, relentlessly it seemed.  We wondered if they would survive.



They did.  Here's how they looked just two months later, in mid-June:

We'll stop worrying.
Bill