Neo-fascism comes to picturesque small-town Italy

 

Men outside Caffè Europa in the Roman hill town of Rocca di Papa.

We've always enjoyed watching the men (it's always men) in local bars, sitting around, playing cards, talking. It seems very communal, a good place for these apparently retired Italians. We were consequently horrified to see the small town where the photo above was taken, our favorite small town in the Alban Hills outside of Rome, identified by the New York Times this past week as a hot bed of neo-Fascism.

We had become inured to the fact that Giorgia Meloni, head of the Fratelli d'Italia party ("Brothers of Italy"), would become prime minister. For months the polls had shown her leading, even if her party received only about one-quarter of the vote. She made a pact with some other devils, including Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini, on her way to the top post in Italy. Salvini was rewarded with the position of Deputy Prime Minister and - get this and don't choke - Minister of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility (no wonder Italian Facebook went nuts over this Brave-New-World-speak).

We've also been keenly aware of the posters and graffiti around Rome that even decades ago promoted neo-Fascism. We wrote about some of these in our posts on posters and right-wing "heroes." (See here and here.)

What appalled us (and we can hear all our Roman friends going, "DUH!") was that our charming, special, sweet town voted 38% for Meloni's party, knowing they were reviving Fascism.

Are those men above likely Fascists? The New York Times featured the bar across the way, Bar Centrale. But my guess is, yes, you're looking at the right-wing there playing cards.

We had noted in a 2014 post a building we thought likely had been Fascist headquarters until after World War II. It's got the bulky look of buildings of that era, it's now a municipal building, and the date is obvious:  "A.D. 1935." One of our loyal readers, Marco, questioned that interpretation, saying: 

"I find it unlikely that the building in the photo may have been once the Party's HQ - not only the style is not Fascist in appearance, but the Fascist Era (Anno XIII E.F.) mark is nowhere to be seen on the building's façade, as are any remnants of chipped-away fasces one'd expect to find on such buildings."

He makes some good points, and perhaps we were wrong about the past (if there were some other factors we had taken into account there, I don't recall them), but there's no question about the present for Rocca di Papa.

One reason we favor the town is that it's the starting point for one of our best hikes, up Monte Cavo. In fact the photo we took, right, of Monte Cavo from the town, was taken from the now infamous (to us) Bar Centrale.

It's not hard to find men hanging out outside the bars or in the very large square that dominates the lower part of the town. (See photo below.)

From now on, we will have to listen more carefully to their conversations, though maybe we won't like what we hear.

Caffè Europa  is dear to our hearts because it's not only where we've always started (coffee) our hikes, it's also where we've ended (beer) them, and parked our scooter. The photo below was taken with our 2nd of three scooters (historically, not all at once), the foregrounded Malaguti, while the guys play cards, per usual.

That the town is picturesque is an understatement, and it's beautifully sited below Monte Cavo (see photo at end of this post). Its "shield" features the "rocca" or fortress - on the fountain that graces the top of the large square in the photo below. And the "Papa" is for a 12th century Pope who lived there (Eugenio III).

Another view below is from the cemetery, and in the distance the ruins of ancient Tusculum, a Roman town. Everything in Rocca di Papa, including the cemetery (and that 1935 building above) is on a slant, given its position on the steeply sloping hillside.

More in a later post on Mussolini and the rise of neo-Fascism.

Dianne

The town of Rocca di Papa, seen from the main piazza. The first phase of the hike to Monte
Cavo is getting to the top of Rocca di Papa via picturesque city streets. The mountain itself is straight ahead but is not visible in the photo. 

TAV or NO TAV: 30 Years of Conflict, and Counting

NO-TAV Leftist Wall Art, Pigneto

TAV--Treno Alta Velocita'--refers generally to high speed rail corridors, but more specifically to a planned high-speed, 170 mile rail line between Turin, Italy, and Lyon, France.  The project has been a contentious one from the first days of planning, in 1990. Recently, a parliamentary vote split the governing coalition, with Matteo Salvini's northern-industrial based Lega party in favor, and Luigi Di Maio's 5-Star Movement, with its anti-government ideology, opposed. In a non-binding vote, TAV was approved. Some of the tunneling had already been done. In the poster below, opponents suggest that the project will produce environmental devastation, strikes, and evictions. Probably all true.

Italian proponents of the new line, most of them in the country's industrial north, argue that the TAV to Lyon will increase trade; that the travel time by train from Turin to Paris connection will be roughly equivalent to air travel; that truck pollution would be significantly reduced--and, anyway, the EU has agreed to pay for about 40% of the cost, and maybe more.

Opponents, aligned under the NO TAV movement, are especially numerous in the many small towns that would line the non-tunnel portions of the track, and especially in Italy's Susa Valley. Because much of the work would involve tunneling through the Alps (one tunnel alone would be 36 miles long), in areas where the rock may contain asbestos, opponents also raise environmental and health concerns. Others are concerned about the inevitable cost over-runs and the corruption that typically attends large infrastructure projects in Italy. And there's doubtless a small-town, rural concern with quality-of-life issues (proponents would call it NIMBY-ism).

NO TAV emerged with the first planning, in the early 1990s. Opposition intensified after 2000, with demonstrations, squatting, trade union actions, and flash mobs, all of it linked, if superficially, with the Partisan opposition to the Nazis in the last years of World War II.

The fire burns. No Tav. 

The Italian part of the project was officially approved in 2011, though not much work has been done on the line since then, and opposition continues. Beppe Grillo, the 5-Star co-founder, has described the project as "a crime against humanity."

In back of the old slaughter house, in Testaccio. Mourning animals, the train driven by death. 

Although most of the hostility to the high-speed line has centered in the rural and small-town north, the issue appeared on Rome's walls as early as 2012 (when RST first began photographing evidence of opposition. TAV continues to be an issue in Rome, though perhaps an increasingly minor one--especially compared with immigration.

Bill

La Lega a Roma: a Story of Politics, Food, and History

This post--our 788th--isn't easy to categorize.  It's obviously about Italian politics.  But it's also about Roman food, and about food, politics, and history.

On a recent walk through the near-in suburb of Aurelia, we found two posters, both on the back of stalls in a traditional open-air market.  They were obviously part of a poster series, starting with the line "La Lega a Roma?"  La Lega is "The League," once "The Northern League," a conservative, anti-immigrant (it used to be anti-the Italian South, which includes Rome), business-oriented political party with its origins in northern Italy.  Today, especially after the European elections in May 2019, it's a national party, with the right-wing, Trump-like demagogue Matteo Salvini its popular leader.  So the posters ask us to think about what it would be like to have The League in Rome--that is, as the dominant party in Rome.

The first poster features a likeness of Julius Caesar, speaking these words:  "E' n'artra cortellata!"
A Roman friend helped us understand the words.  "'N'artra," she explained, "is Roman (as in the modern-day Roman dialect) for 'un'altra,' that is,"another," while 'cortellata' is Roman for cotellata, that is, 'stab.'"  For La Lega to be in Rome, then, is "like being stabbed one more time."  Caesar would know.

The second of the posters featured a woman who deals with the issue La Lega a Roma this way: "'E' come a carbonara co' la panna!"  Our correspondent explained:  "The woman in the picture was a very famous character in Roma: Sora Lella, sister of actor Aldo Fabrizi (you'll remember him as the priest in [Rosellini's 1946 film] Roma citta' aperta) and owner of a renowned restaurant on Isola Tiberina, considered the temple of traditional Italian cuisine in its heyday."

It was clear to me, then, that "panna" (cream) was not a good thing to put in pasta carbonara, one of Rome's classic dishes.  As food critic Mitch Orr writes on the Vice website, "Carbonara has egg yolk, Pecorino Romano, guanciale, black pepper, and pasta.  Under no circumstances can there be any other additions, and that goes double for cream."  To imagine the League in Rome is to imagine carbonara with cream. Disgusting.

The hashtag #Romanonfalastupida can be translated, "Rome, don't be stupid," or "Rome, don't be silly."  Romans took notice.  La Lega did very poorly in Rome in the 2019 elections for the European parliament (although that didn't stop Salvini from putting up posters thanking Rome).

Sora Lella (Elena Fabrizi), who was also an actress, began working in her family's restaurant in 1959.  She died in 1993.  The restaurant, known as Sora Lella, is still there.

Bill

Testaccio.  Difficult to decipher, but filling in the blanks:  "This time, I'll set myself on fire!"
Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake as a heretic in  1600. 

"Liberation Day" 2019 :The Left turns out (there are not "nice people" on both sides) and parties.

"Liberation...April 25...Pigneto Neighborhood Party"

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!"

A good time was had by all.