Not Quite a Christmas Story: A Bar and a Church

In the early years of the last century, a Roman family bought a nice piece of land in Monteverde Vecchio, then sparsely developed.  They hoped--indeed, expected--that the parcel's location, just a 10-minute walk from the Trastevere train station, and on what they knew would be the main road up the hill, would position the family to serve and profit from the expected traffic.  Location, location, location. 

Bar Vitali, modestly promoted
(the sign says only "BAR")

And it happened that way--or sort of.  The Vitali family started a business there that evolved into a bar, on Via Lorenzo Valla, and it's still there, and very successful, more than 75 years later.  Today it's owned by Mario Vitali, a grandson of the original owners, and it's become a bar/restaurant (lunch only), and one of more than local reputation, if only because Italian movie director Nanni Moretti lives nearby and eats there from time to time.  On the MAP below, Mario's bar lies at the intersection of Via Lorenzo Valla and Via Pindemonte, the dog-leg street coming in from above.

Monteverde Vecchio in 1935.  The photo hangs
in a back room of Mario's place. 

The flow of automobiles and scooters by the bar is substantial, too, certainly all that one could expect in an area of one-way streets.  But it is not what the Vitali family had in mind when they purchased the property.  They believed then, and it seemed a very good bet, that traffic flowing uphill into Monteverde Vecchio would move straight out of the small piazza fronting the train station (and off two major thoroughfares, the Gianicolense and Viale Trastevere, which come together there) and directly northwest, onto Via Lorenzo Valla: a straight shot to the bar.  Visions of coining money. 

But it didn't happen that way.  If you look at a map, or stroll the area, you'll see that there is no street running straight uphill from the train station.  Instead, there's a church (on the map, the blue rectangle at lower right, with a cross).

The church was built in 1942 (Mario knows the date, all too well), in the last years of Fascism, and it's situated right where the anticipated road would have been.   It's an undistinguished, late-Fascist-era building, just the sort of place that Bill enjoys and to which Dianne must be dragged.  I don't think you'll ever get Mario Vitali inside.  And now you know why.

Bill

PS from Dianne - Mario is something of a local historian and has written (in Italian only and now out of print) an intriguing family history.  His grandmother, widowed young with 4 very young children, simply started cooking for local construction workers, then selling anything she could buy and break up into smaller lots.  Her home turned into a luncheonette, then a store, then the bar and tobacco shop owned by Mario's father.  Mario's grandmother, who had built her business from scratch, was the one most upset by the church's closing off of via Lorenzo Valla, Mario told me when I asked.  But she did attend the church and her burial procession, down via Lorenzo Valla, ended there - a touch of irony in the whole story.

May Day Irony

May Day, the 1st day of May, is rapidly approaching. Italians love their holidays, and May Day, which in its modern form celebrates work, labor, unions, and socialism, is one of their favorites.

The problem, we found out last year, is that it can be hard to get around on May Day, hard to attend the concerts and celebrations and marches, because, well, nobody's working. And "nobody," to our surprise, includes the people who operate Rome's public transport system.

We were living in Monteverde Nuovo, a couple of blocks from the Gianicolense and the tram that runs down to Trastevere and then across the river. We don't have a car, and the scooter was indisposed. So like many others in the neighborhood, we counted on the tram or buses to get us into the Centro.

Guess not! We arrived at the tram stop at Piazza San Giovanni di Dio at about 1 in the afternoon. An hour later we were still there. No tram, no buses.


Maybe we were just stupid foreigners. Maybe, but there were plenty of forlorn Italians waiting for Godot, exchanging local myths about what had happened to the tram and when the next bus would arrive. We took this photograph of those with whom we shared the afternoon.

Bill

Brutalist Rome

Brutalist architecture is an offshoot of the International Style. It was popular (or unpopular) from about 1955 to 1980. Coined in 1954, the term "brutalist" is apparently derived from the French "beton brut," meaning raw concrete, the building material most identified with the style, and the word "brutalist" was popularized by architectural historian Reyner Banham in the 1966 book, The New Brutalism.

Brutualist architecture has some or all of the following characteristics, in order of importance: the use of lots of poured concrete slabs; unfinished surfaces and, more generally, the desire NOT to disguise the rough materials of which buildings are made; geometric repetition of building elements and forms; and the exposure of steel beams, ventilation ducts, and other elements of a building that are normally hidden from view. Many brutalist buildings would be described as massive, and most clash with their environment is ways that many observers find unappealing.

Brutalist architecture looked for inspiration to the work of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, particularly his 1953 Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India. Among the most influential Brutalist works is Paul Rudolph's Yale University Art and Architecture Building, completed in 1963.

There isn't much brutalism in Rome and environs. We found this high school (left) in Monteverde Vecchio, off via Fonteiana, just above via di Donna Olimpia.

One project that has some of brutalism's characteristics but not others is Corviale, a housing project southwest of Rome's Centro. Corviale was begun in 1972 and the first tenants moved in a decade later. It is certainly massive: 1200 apartments, 9 floors, 980 meters long! Although the front of the building does not use concrete in the way most brutalist buildings do, the concrete corridors in back are classically brutalist (below right). As one might expect, Corviale has had its critics, among them Prince Charles, who once remarked after visiting the building, "You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble." A story from the popular culture has it that Corviale's architect committed suicide when he saw the finished product.

The lovely example of brutalism at top and at right is in our own neighborhood, right behind the market in Piazza San Giovanni di Dio, up the Gianicolense in Trastevere. The Church of Our Lady of Salette occupies the highest ground in the immediate area. The main entrance is off the Piazza Madonna della Salette (La Salette refers to a small town in the Alps where a miracle occurred in 1846--the sighting of the Virgin Mary, or perhaps the last date someone found a parking place in the piazza).

The church was designed by architects Viviana Rizzi and Ennio Canino, about which not much is known except that they also designed the Church of San Giovanni Crisostomo (1969) in the zone of Monte Sacro Alto. The Salette structure was begun in 1957 and completed in 1965, to serve a new parish in the then rapidly expanding Monteverde Nuovo. The photograph of the interior was taken on Easter Sunday. Bill