A Day on the Periphery: Torre di Righetti, and the Pleasures of Trullo

There's a plan afoot--it's even been funded--to repristinare (redo, clean up, refurbish) Torre di Righetti, a mid-19th-century tower, constructed for hunting (so we read), and the hill on which it sits: Monte Cucco. We had heard of Monte dei Cocci (another name for Monte Testaccio) and Monte Ciocci (Valle Aurelia, a flank of Monte Mario), but Monte Cucco remained a mystery. We found it on the outskirts of Trullo, one of our favorite near-in towns/suburbs, which is located south of long and winding via Portuense and west of the totally unwalkable viale Isacco Newton. Too far to walk, and not easy to get to.

Transportation Czar Dianne figured it out. Train from Stazione Tiburtina to the Magliana stop. Up the stairs to the bus stop, 719 bus 7 stops to the base of Monte Cucco. Perfect.

A few missteps up the hill, then asked a guy driving out of the only farmhouse (well fenced in) where the "Torre" was, then back down and up the only real "road."

Up the road. Nothing in sight yet. 

And there it was, virtually alone on the barren hilltop. In two years (or never) it will be rebuilt and, so we've read, will host art shows. We'll believe that when we see it. The Monte is to have bike paths and benches. The time to see the torre, and the monte, is now, in its evocative "ruins" state, as it's been for decades.

Dianne refused to enter Torre Righetti (fearing for her safety - crumbling buildings and all) until I mentioned that the hole in the center reminded me of the "light artist" James Turrell. 

To one side, superb views of two of EUR's most prominent buildings: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (aka the Square Coliseum, now owned by Fendi) and the Basilica dei Santi Pietro e Paolo. They look closer than they are in the photo below.

As we learned from a small mural later that day in downtown Trullo, the hilltop was the site of a 1966 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini: "Uccellacci e Uccellini" ("Hawks and Sparrows"), starring Toto and Ninetto Davoli. (All our Roman friends knew the film and the locale, though they hadn't been there.)  A tree depicted in the mural (and presumably in the film) no longer exists. The Basilica appears in the mural.

Monte Cucco is also home to other ruins: a substantial villa/farmhouse, near a clump of trees. These are the ruins of early-19th-century Villa Baccelli, which belonged to  Guido Baccelli, Minister of Education several times in the early years of the State of Italy and, later, his son Alfredo. Higher up the hill we found what appears to have been a facility for animals (maybe feeding troughs). The farmhouse ruins include a long, steep, and deep tunnel (the opening to it freaked out Dianne too). We read the tunnel accesses what are known as Fairy Grottoes (le grotte delle fate), an underground quarry and caves, dating to the 6th century BCE and understood to be the residence of the God Silvanus (for the Latins) and Selvans (for the Etruscans). In the early 20th century the caves were used as an aircraft shelter.  

What's left of Villa Baccelli 

Tunnel to the "Fairy Grottoes," dating to the 6th century BCE 

 

What we thought were feeding troughs in an out-building.

It's just a 10-minute walk from the Torre to downtown Trullo (backtracking on the 719 bus route) and well worth the journey. Trullo is full of exceptional outdoor wall art, often presented with prose and poetry, and much of it on the sides of buildings that compose a 1940-era public housing project, still in decent shape and illustrative of an era when public authorities in the West still built housing for those with modest incomes. Just a sample or two to follow--don't want to spoil the experience. 

At the town's main intersection there's a substantial interior market and a couple of nice bars. That's Dianne enjoying a cafe Americano with a mural behind her.  The barista, who at first greeted us coolly, was very excited and voluble when he found we were not immediately going back to the United States but spent months in Rome.  After initially "overcharging" us, he gave us the locals' price, and free chocolate.

And, up a broad stair, what once was the city hall, now covered, in rather spectacular fashion, by leftist graffiti, wall art, and prose. For some years the building was occupied by leftist organizations, but at the moment it appears to be empty and closed. Enjoy the exterior before it, too, is "repristinatoed." 

A painting--and a poem--on the facade of what once was Trullo's city hall. Some of the writing here celebrates 30 years of "occupation" of the building (1987-2017), and the graffiti "spray artist" is writing "I hate prison. I love liberty."

As you walk around you may (or may not) see giant electrical towers. One by one they're being removed; those that remain are no longer functioning. 

To return to Rome: follow the main road (via del Trullo - not too pedestrian friendly, but walkable) south (retracing the bus route), then west to the frequent train at the Magliana stop, below.

Bill 

Sartogo's Santo Volto Church - a Top Ten Visit

Put the 2006 church of Santo Volto di Gesù ("the Holy Face of Jesus") on your top 10 list for modern Rome architecture.  Less heralded than US architect Richard Meier's 2003 Dives in Miseracordia (known as the "Jubilee Church"), Santo Volto is equal to Meier's work and in some ways surpasses it. It's also closer to the center of Rome and easier to get to.

It's hard to overstate the dramatic impact of Santo Volto in this somewhat run-down neighborhood of Magliana.  Rome architect Piero Sartogo inserted the church into the fabric of the community on a small plot of land, totally unlike Meier's church, which has been heavily criticized for not being "of the neighborhood."  Perhaps for these reasons, too, the church is so heavily packed for Sunday mass that one must get there early to get a seat.  Sartogo's collaborator and wife, Nathalie Grenon, confirms the people in the community are proud of the church.

The 'half dome' looming among the nearby apartment buildings.

Sartogo used the concept of negative volume to present in reality a half-dome, an echo of the Pantheon, but modernized.  Quoting Grenon in a 2013 interview with us:
     The site of the church is critical. It's the idea of a city; it's urban. The language of the architecture here is the mass and the void. The void becomes a dynamic element, the void is inserted by creating a mass; and so there's that tension, as there is tension between the urban environment and the sacred.

But Grenon won't call the building "post modern."  In her words:

Entrance, with rectangular shapes contrasting with the round 'cupola.'
We would say shades of Fascism's rationalist period, but Grenon wouldn't buy it.
She would say only that the materials are Roman.

      The Santo Volto cupola is a reference to the Pantheon, and its idea of the sacred. In the Pantheon the sphere is inside, while in our church, the two halves of the dome are separate: one represents the sacred and the other the profane. All of Rome is constructed with shapes that come from somewhere else.

Let's just say the effect is awe-inspiring.  As social critic Alain de Botton says of some churches, they're designed to make you feel the power of God--and this one does, perhaps even for nonbelievers.

Mimmo Palladino's 4th Station of the Cross (Jesus meets his
afflicted mother).

Santo Volto is a showcase for contemporary Italian artists. Sartogo and Grenon commissioned several of them to provide the liturgical furnishings.  There was no budget for this purpose, and they had to work almost for free.  Some were famous; some were young and not.  Noted artist Mimmo Palladino's stations of the cross are impressive and of this century.  Young artist Pietro Ruffo's  "face of Jesus" painting is hauntingly gorgeous.

Pietro Ruffo's face of Jesus, above the confessionals.

And then there's the crucifix.  It was originally designed by noted Italian artist Jannis Kounnelis, but the Diocese rejected his design.  Sartogo and Grenon had to come up with something quickly, before the Pope's visit.  She sketched out the crucifix, which was supposed to be temporary but has become iconic.  It's now for sale at the Vatican.

Grenon holding a replica of the crucifix she
designed.

Grenon's interview contains more fascinating comments.  It's here in TheAmerican/inItaly online magazine.

The church is open as most churches are; with a break in the middle of the day.  To be safe, we suggest going before noon or from 4-7 pm.  Impressive as it is outside, you will want to see the inside too.  Via della Magliana 166.  The church is about 3/4 mile (1.3 km) from Piazza Meucci at the southern end of the Marconi district.

As some of our loyal readers know, we have made the modern churches of Rome a project.  For posts on churches, put 'modern church' in the search engine.

Additional photos below of, first, Meier's Jubilee Church and then several more of Santo Volto.

Dianne

Richard Meier's Jubilee Church.  The exception that proves the rule:  this day
we saw people enjoying the somewhat isolated church piazza.

Entrance doors to Santo Volto - echoing Renaissance church bronze doors.

Outside the half-cupola, in the open volume.

Play and contemplative space in back, nestled in the community.

From inside the church - through the back 'wall' and crucifix-
 one can see the neighborhood apartments.

Nathalie Grenon with the crucifix she designed--
now on sale at the Vatican.

Schematic of church and list of artists.

The Dogs of Rome: a Conor Fitzgerald Novel

"He's got a garage," said Blume.  "Jesus, I'd give my right arm to have one of those."   The speaker is Alec Blume, an American by birth and now, in his 40s, Chief Commissioner of Rome's police department--a high-level detective.  Earnest, determined, smart, opinionated--"I hate Sordi.  Hate his movies, hate his voice.  All that Romanaccio shit"--somewhat arrogant and ethical to a fault, Blume is at the center of Conor Fitzgerald's entertaining new (2010) crime novel, The Dogs of Rome.  The title refers not to the tiny, yappy dogs that most Romans favor, but to larger beasts trained to be nasty for the dog fights that all too many Romans enjoy and which take place, in the novel, in an abandoned warehouse off the Via della Magliana.  (In August 2001, Rome's real police discovered 7 dogs, intended for fighting, in a nomad camp off the Via della Magliana.)  Blume detests dogs, but he ends up with one--a Cane Corso, described as a dog the Romans used in battle. 

A Cane Corso.  Man's best
friend--except when he's not.

Novels are always partly invented, and that may be the case with several of Fitzgerald's references.  I could find no evidence of a Rome restaurant with the name "Mattatoio Cinque" ("Slaughterhouse 5") nor does the internet confirm the existence of De Pedris, a shop that serves exquisite pastry.  But Fitzgerald--who lives in Rome--knows his geography, and readers hungering for Rome and its environs will find in these pages references to (and comments about) the familiar (EUR), obscure (Borgata Fideni--to the north) and those in between (Corviale).  One transforming scene takes place in the quartiere of Marconi, along Via Oderisi da Gubbio, Viale Marconi, and Piazza della Radio, the latter accurately noted as a great place to park a car for the Porta Portese Sunday market.  Another dramatic scene plays out in the area between Via La Spezia, where Blume resides, and the Basilica of San Giovanni.  Blume's parents are buried in the not-too-distant Verano cemetery.  


Tourists who want to think Rome is just one gelateria after another may find distasteful Fitzgerald's conclusion that what is "eternal" about the city is its organized crime and the corruption that ripples through politics and the police force.  "For a quarter of a century," one of his characters opines, "the police have not disturbed the criminal status quo in the districts of Magliana, Tufello, Ostia, Corviale, Laurentino 38, Tor Bella Monaca, Tor de' Schiavi, Pietralata, Casalbruciato, and Centocelli."  In a previous post, we described Centocelli as charming.  We would not--and did not--say that about Corviale, though we were fascinated by the mammoth 1970s housing project by that name.  We no longer stroll, as we did only a few years ago, in the projects of Magliana. 

This writer is no great fan of detective novels; he's probably read five in a lifetime.  But I was very much taken with Dogs of Rome.  Blume is a worthy protagonist, and Fitzgerald's story has pace and drama.  Most important, there's just enough about Rome and Romans.  Of one of his characters, Fitzgerald muses:  "He considered going carefully...but there was no point.  No policeman in Rome ever pulled anyone over for reckless driving.  They considered it demeaning."  Coming from a killer, but right on. Bill

Rome: Walk(s) on the Wild Side

When we first imagined Rome the Second Time as a book, we roughed out a chapter--ideas, really--titled "Walk on the Wild Side" (from the 1956 Nelson Algren novel, A Walk on the Wild Side or the 1972 Lou Reed song, "Walk on the Wild Side"). The chapter would be aimed at the most intrepid of Rome tourists, and it would include elements of the Rome experience, past and present, that were mysterious, somewhat forbidding or intimidating, or unusual enough to jar the sensibilities, to give one a sense of having contact with a Rome that was hidden and seldom seen. We decided against the chapter title--we didn't want to scare off our core audience--and toned down the content for Rome the Second Time, yet we tried to preserve a sense of real adventure.

We were reminded of all this not long ago when Jason Hitchcock Creeley, writing on the Rome the Second Time group Facebook site, asked whether there was "a tour of some kind in Rome or a mention in a guidebook...about the more surreal, even seedier side of Rome. Maybe Pasolini's haunts? Things Fellini found quirky and off-beat?"

We don't know too much about Fellini's off-beat tastes, but we do know something about the poet, novelist, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his way of being in Rome is a good place to start. Pasolini was into the "other"--the people of Rome who were different from him and from other, middle-class Romans--and for Pasolini (and anyone else with the same goals) that meant exploring the society and culture of Rome's poor--what Marx called the "lumpen proletariat." He found them, as one would find them today, on the outskirts of the city, in Rome's far-flung neighborhoods, which now are middle class and don't seem so far out: Monte Sacro was one, Monteverde Nuovo another, and a third an area called Mandrione, a triangle of land formed by via Tuscolana, via del Mandrione, and via Porta Furba. He found them, too, in and around the public housing projects that had been built under Fascism in the 1920s and 1930s; his Ragazzi di Vita is about teenage young men who lived in or near one of those high-rise projects, the one (still) located in Piazza Donna Olimpia, in Monteverde Nuovo, where Pasolini would go to talk with the boys and kick a soccer ball around. And Pasolini found them on the banks of Rome's rivers--on the Aniene near Monte Sacro, and on the Tevere--where boys without much money went to swim and cavort.

It's not that hard to locate landmarks of Pasolini's life in Rome, and through them to see and experience something of what he felt. You can read Pasolini's books--especially Ragazzi di Vita (1955) and the realistic novel, A Violent Life. You can also visit some of the places where he spent time, including Mandrione (there's a small booklet on the area and its history, in Italian). Itinerary 9 in Rome the Second Time takes you into Monte Sacro and down along the banks of the Aniene, along riverside paths used almost entirely by locals, complete with private (and probably illegal) gardens and, here and there, a rogue tent (at left). We also describe our attempt to reach the confluence of the Aniene and Tevere Rivers, an effort that ended when we encountered a village of (no doubt illegal immigrant) squatters and were warned to turn back.

At least in Rome, the banks of the Tevere, with their huge 19th-century and early 20th-century flood walls, are more open and less intimidating than those of the Aniene, but long walks along Rome's major river will undoubtedly take you, now and then, by Rome's homeless, getting along under one bridge or another.

We also had a wonderfully interesting walk (not in Rome the Second Time) along the right bank of the Tevere. We found the path just beyond Piazza Meucci at the south end of the Marconi district, paralleling (for a while) via della Magliana, then along Lungotevere di. Magliana: warehouses, horses, gardens, makeshift homes. Poor people with homes dug out of hillsides or built into narrow valleys can be found in many places in Rome. We describe one such encounter in Itinerary 9, "Monte Mario," and another in Itinerary 11, "Parco del Pineto," where we were kindly escorted through the the narrow walkways of an immigrant squatters' village in the center of the park by one of the residents, who sensed we needed the help.

Mussolini's public housing projects (case popolari) are accessible, too, and with some imagination one can get a sense of the world Pasolini found there in 1955 or 1960. There's one on the Monte Sacro/Aniene itinerary mentioned above; another, extensive and quite evocative (not mentioned in Rome the Second Time), in the Flaminio district at Piazza Melozzo da Forli, which is along viale del Vignola; a lovely, thoroughly gentrified project on Itinerary 7 (Piazza Bologna); and the towering, sculpted, and somewhat decayed buildings on Piazza di Donna Olimpia, noted above.

Had Pasolini been alive when the massive public housing project known as Corviale was finished in the early 1980s, he would surely have been attracted by the kilometer-long building with its 1202 apartments. Located southwest of the Rome's center near via Portuense, it's fascinating but also somewhat intimidating. We looked around a bit and took some pictures, but with due circumspection. Still, it's a phenomenon--one of the world's most famous public housing projects, like modernist, crime-ridden Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis (1954/55, demolished 1970s).

Today, Pasolini would be seeking contact with Rome's new immigrants, some legal and some illegal, many from North Africa and Eastern Europe, some living in official immigrant camps, some in informal ones. It would be fascinating to walk around these camps, but also quite dangerous, we think, and we don't advise it. The closest we've come to one of the informal camps was while walking along a wide asphalt path (via del Ratardo) that ambles along the left (east) bank of the Tevere north of the city. We got access to the path at Ponte Flaminio (that's what we remember, anyway) and had walked a ways, passing by all manner of athletic facilities (the banks of the Tevere are dotted with soccer fields), when we saw the immigrant camp down and on the right. Another place to find immigrant communities (and some drug addicts) is on the city's night buses. After midnight, when the restaurants close in Trastevere and the #8 tram inexplicably stops operating, the area's dishwashers and other low-level workers pile on the buses going up viale di Trastevere. You can join them on the bus. Be prepared to be squished.

The young have their own weird places to go and be, and we're neither young nor fans of rock music nor into drugs, so the mysteries of youth, and the often-seedy locales where they do their thing, are mostly beyond us. Still, over the years we've found some of these spaces and recommend them to the adventurous. Among the better known is Monte Testaccio, home to dozens of late-night clubs and bars dug into the mountain. The area in back--a road and a large parking lot--is known for drug deals, and we wouldn't circle the mountain after dark. Another club area is located in a warehouse district between via Ostiense and the Metro line, just past Circonvallazione Ostiense, in Garbatella (as we recall); it's got a certain dark, clandestine feel to it. The district of San Lorenzo is better lit and better policed, and it still has some of the raunchy, sometimes pathetic clubs and general messiness that Jack Kerouac would have seen as "authentic." The Pigneto zone is at the cusp of gentrification, but it's full of immigrants (as well as Italians) and young people and funky attractions, and after dark the narrow, tree-lined side streets have a film-noirish aura unmatched elsewhere in Rome. Pasolini spent a lot of time there many years ago, and, despite changes, he probably still would today. See our "An Evening in Pigneto" in Rome the Second Time.

Because Rome is a center of government and tourism, it can be difficult to observe Romans doing what writer Paul Goodman referred to in Growing Up Absurd as "real man's work." Watching the barrista make your latte doesn't qualify. We have three suggestions. To get a feel for an older industrial and warehouse area, try the "alternate route" for Itinerary 4 (see map), which begins at the Pyramid and circles a part of Ostiense. Second, along the left bank of the Tevere, down a gravel road called via di Riva Ostiense (entered from via del Porto Fluviale, at the river), you'll find the Factory Occupata--assuming it still exists, which it may not--an experimental art and cultural space created a couple of years ago when some young people, disturbed by the decline of the city's industrial buildings, occupied one of the area's unused factories. A poster for a Factory Occupata event, at left, features a gazometro, an iconic feature of the area's industrial landscape. The place is bizarre; if there's an event there when you're in town (we saw ex-Black Panther David Hilliard give a talk)--no matter what it is--go. Across the city, we recommend the streets just to the south of Piazzale del Verano,
where craftsmen cut the stones that adorn the adjacent Verano Cemetery (at right). Piazzale Verano is also well known as the site of a deadly and destructive allied bombing raid in World War II.



Of all the unusual Rome spaces we've come across, none is more "surreal" (to use Jason Creeley's term) than one inhabited almost exclusively by the young: Forte Prenestino, a real fort and, for some years now, a real alternative social center. We have written about the place in Rome the Second Time (pp. 192-93), and we fondly recall the shock and awe we experienced at walking its dark corridors and underground passageways (left)
for the first time. Da non perdere; not to be missed. Also high on that index is a walk through Rome--Rome the First Time: the Coliseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, Trastevere--between 4 a.m. and just after sunrise. Not the "wild side," but unforgettable. Maybe even surreal.

Bill