Amanda Knox and Rome

This post was first published on April 6, 2013


It’s not easy to find a connection between Rome and Amanda Knox, the Seattle college student accused of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007.  But, since I was determined to write something about it - and Bill was equally determined that there be a Rome connection for RST - I finally found the link.

The decision in the last week of March to overturn Knox’s and her then boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito’s acquittal was issued by Italy’s Supreme Court, called the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. That Court of Cassation is located in Rome’s Palace of Justice, a turn of the last century building most Romans think is comically bad. Of course, Bill finds things to love about it, and will do a post on it some day.

The Palace of Justice from the Piazza Cavour side (that's Cavour on the column)

From the Lungotevere side - it looks its best in this photo

There will be more pronouncements in the Knox/Sollecito case coming from Rome, too, when the Court issues its explanation – which it has not yet – within about 90 days.  That explanation should be fascinating, because the lower court, an intermediate appeals court, threw out Knox’s and Sollecito’s convictions on the grounds there was NO evidence.

I must admit we were not initially fascinated with the Knox case, perhaps because it all seemed too full of extreme claims and positions.  And we also assumed Knox would get a reasonable trial under the Italian system, whose differences from the U.S.'s we appreciate and had no intention of derogating. It wasn’t until I read the Afterword in Douglas Preston’s book on murders in and around Florence, The Monster of Florence, that I became intrigued by the Knox and Sollecito cases.  I didn’t even want to read The Monster of Florence, but someone gave it to me for Christmas and I felt obliged to at least look at it. 

Preston

I still wasn’t that interested in murders around Florence, but Preston's and co-author Mario Spezi’s treatment by the prosecutor in the Florence cases was astounding.  The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, had Spezi jailed.   Preston can’t go back to Italy.  And they were simply journalists investigating the murders.  It reminds one of Egypt or Syria or Russia, not Italy.  And, when the Afterword tells us that this abusive prosecutor who accused Spezi of the murders at one point is the same one who cooked up the stories about Knox and Sollecito, that was riveting   Mignini has since been charged with multiple counts of abuse of office.  Most of the charges were thrown out, but one remains and is on appeal.  He remains in office nonetheless and has risen in profile to an English Wikipedia entry:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuliano_Mignini). 

And, I should point out, Mignini also sued the West Seattle Herald.  Having been born and raised in West Seattle, I can attest that this little neighborhood newspaper (births, deaths, prom queens, grocery coupons) is not exactly into cutting-edge journalism.  Stooping to sue the Herald would make me laugh, if the entire affair weren’t so tragic.

It’s interesting to us, too, that Italians and Americans seem to have two very different takes on the Knox case.  Most Americans think she is innocent.  Most Italians think she is guilty and that only Hillary Clinton (!) got her out of jail and back to the U.S.  The Italians are disgusted at the Americans’ portrayal of their judicial system – but they should take a hard look at Mignini, in my opinion.  One dual citizen friend of ours, Don Carroll,  who is about the most measured person I’ve known, wrote a piece I recommend in 2011 about the Knox case in the online magazine, The American/inItalia:  http://www.theamericanmag.com/article.php?feature=law&column=101&article=2997.   

Dempsey

Douglas Preston is interviewed regularly on the Knox case, and wrote an article for USA Today when the latest verdict came down.  http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/03/27/douglas-preston-on-knox-and-italian-crime-system/2025167/.  For an account by a Seattle journalist, who has covered the case from its beginning and wrote an award-winning book about it - and is admittedly pro-Knox, see Candace Dempsey’s blog:  http://blog.seattlepi.com/dempsey/2013/03/31/amanda-knox-the-carnival-ride-continues/ 

Dianne

Piazza Cavour

This looks like a postcard, but it's not

Finding respite from Rome's noise and traffic and frenetic pace can be a challenge.  The city has its huge parks, of course, but they're complex, often ragged, and intimidating in their grand scope.  Of Rome's smaller green spaces, one of the most inviting is Piazza Cavour.  It's just steps from the Tevere and the Castel Sant' Angelo, and just behind the enormous Palace of Justice.  Recently refurbished, it has lost the shaggy look it had not long ago (see photo at end of this post).  There's real suburban-style grass available for sitting or strolling or reclining in the mid-day sun. 

The gaudy Palace of Justice, showing off the authority of the state

You might want to begin your exploration of Piazza Cavour with a quick look at the Palace of Justice, which shields most of the piazza from some of the heaviest traffic in Rome.  It is sometimes referred to as the Palazzaccio, a term that dates from an investigation into the building's excessively long period of construction (1889-1910), and one that we would translate as "big ugly palace."

One of those jurists, looking back at the palace

Tourists are not welcome inside (we tried, but there's too much justice-oriented stuff going on inside), but you may be able to muster appreciation for 6 exterior statues (there are 4 more inside) of great Italian jurists, including Cicero and Vico.  The palace itself was designed by Guglielmo Calderini, who was apparently as disappointed with the result as the general public.  Although the palace remains an object of derision for its obvious gradiosity, the discriminating tourist might value the building as an example of the cult of excess that characterized public buildings that were intended to demonstrate the authority of the young Italian state.  Of course, the best example of that excess is the monument to Vittorio Emmanuele II in Piazza Venezia.

Monument to Cavour

Unlike Rome's large public parks, Piazza Cavour is a highly symmetrical, uniform, and contained space, qualities that produce a sense of shelter and calm.  From the piazza side, the palace seems less aggressive and more a welcome barrier to traffic noise and the movement of automobiles and scooters.  The gardens, dating to 1895/1911, are appropriately centered by a statue to Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (popularly known as "Cavour"), a statesman deeply involved in the movement for Italian unification--though he died (1861) before Rome was brought into the union.  The Cavour statue is surrounded by allegories of Rome and Italy.  The work dates to 1895 and was accomplished by Stefano Galletti.

Chiesa Evangelica Valdese

There are other elements of interest in the piazza.  On one corner (to the right with one's back to the palace) is a 1911 church in the neo-Romantic style, the Chiesa Evangelica Valdese (the Valdese Community is a Protestant Christian sect).

Teatro Adriano

In the center back of the Piazza is the Teatro Adriano, a prominent space for film and theater.  Then there's all that nice grass, waiting to be enjoyed.  And, when you've had your fill of these pleasures, we suggest the bar just across the street at the left corner of the piazza, on via Crescenzio.
Bill

Piazza Cavour, before it was spruced up

 

John Cheever: Encounter with Rome

In October 1956, the writer John Cheever (the "Chekhov of the [NYC] suburbs") and his pregnant wife Mary left the Westchester, CT suburbs for a year in Rome.  He had just put the finishing touches on The Wapshot Chronicle, his first novel (it would prove a big success).  A friend found them a place to live: a grand but drafty apartment on the fourth floor of the Palazzo Doria-Pamphili, across Piazza Venezia from where Mussolini had governed. 

The comfy palazzo where the Cheevers lived.

Their landlady was the Principessa Doria herself, but she couldn't or didn't fix the kitchen gas leak or clean the clogged drains.  Thanksgiving soon arrived, but no one in the family knew much Italian and the shopping for the holiday went badly, and instead of roast turkey the Cheevers dined on salami, cheese and bread.  "I still cook breakfast in my underwear," Cheever wrote, "in this Palace of Justice or Haunted Public Library."

No, Rome wasn't an American suburb, and perhaps that's why Cheever had trouble writing during his stay in the city.  He managed one short story--one even he didn't much like--but that was it.  As usual, he socialized, often with a cocktail in hand.  While Mary and the Italian maids took care of their baby (born at Salvador Mundi Hospital, on the Gianicolo), John explored the "Academy" (the American Academy, on the Gianicolo) and what he called the "nonAcademy."  According to his biographer, Blake Bailey, he found a good number of "duds" in each group, which in some cases may have meant they didn't drink as much as he did.  He had a long, pleasant walk with Robert Penn Warren along the Via Aurelia, but despaired at Warren's quoting of Dante and the writer's other intellectual pretensions.  Similarly, he found another Academy Fellow, Ralph Ellison, friendly enough but given to "talking about negroes" and philosophizing about "mass motivation."  Cheever had read Ellison's masterpiece, Invisible Man, and found it--not unlike Warren and Ellison--"longwinded."

Cheever was not the first person to be
uninspired by the Tomb of Augustus

One imagines that Cheever and Ellison, despite their differences, found common ground in their shared inability to appreciate the charms of the Eternal City.  For Cheever, that disaffection owed something to his failure to learn enough Italian to feel comfortable, but it was more than that.  On his first day in the city, an exasperated Cheever, coming upon the less-than-august Tomb of Augustus, lamented, "Is this all, is this all there is?"  No, it wasn't all there is, but it seems Rome's great monuments of antiquity never quite captured Cheever's fancy. 

That said, America's greatest short-story writer (or so some think) may have found in Rome a place in which to revel in his romantic (and bisexual) thoughts and fantasies.  The city's "mystery," as Bailey puts it, appealed to Cheever; he "liked the strangeness of Rome."   "At nightfall," Cheever wrote, "the combination of dim-lamps and Roman gin make me feel very peculiar....The city seems mercurial and while it is lovely in the sun with the fountains sparkling, it looks, in the rain, like the old movie-shot: European capital on the Eve of War....the atmosphere of anxiety and gloom is dense."

Roman gin?
Bill