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 

Rome on Fire

Fires in Rome are relatively rare, or so it seems.  It may just be that, like traffic accidents, fires are numerous but almost always elsewhere, out of one's personal sight.  To our knowledge, there hasn't been a "real" fire in Rome's mountains and rolling hills for decades, even though farmers continue to light small fires to burn trash (or whatever), and it seems logical that the practice would sooner or later produce a conflagration in nearby fields or woods. When I was growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1950s, it was legal (and widely practiced) to have an open, circular iron contraption to burn stuff at the back of the property.  And sure enough, the adjacent fields caught on fire on a regular basis, blackening an acre or two of open land.


Despite the rarity of Rome fires, we have seen a few over the years.  Nothing major, but interesting nonetheless.  Four years ago, while exploring the somewhat dicey working-class town/suburb of Trullo for the first time, we came across not one but TWO burning trash bins (above and below).  Young punks resisting authority, we supposed.  Not good publicity for Trullo, but since then the town has experienced something of a regeneration through a substantial program of wall art and wall poetry. 

Then, in the spring of 2017, we happened upon--or in one case, read about--several fires.  In one case, we were on the way to a physician's office in the exclusive quartiere of Coppede'.  There on via Adige was this sad sight.  The owners of the burned automobile at left were there on the sidewalk, grieving and coping, a lot of work ahead of them.  Perhaps more young punk activity; privileged, alienated youth. 

Then, on the return from a hike in the Colli Albani, while passing through Piazza Finocchiaro Aprile, we came upon a more serious blaze along the far side of the railroad track, close to the Tuscolana station.  We parked the scooter and had a look.  This fire was in the papers the next day, but it was apparently put out without consequences.

There were, indeed, consequences to the final fire on our list.  This was a river bank blaze, known by some as the gazometro fire because of its proximity to the iconic Ostiense structure.  We knew this backwater area well, having explored it and observed its inhabitants from afar.  No one was killed, but quite a few "residents" of the river bank--Roma living in huts and tents--were rendered homeless by the blaze. 

 Bill

Walking to Trullo: for Art's Sake

The plan seemed reasonable, to Bill, anyway.  We had had heard that the working-class Rome suburb of Trullo--we'd been there once before--had been redecorated by volunteer street artists, and we wanted to see the community in all its new glory.  We decided to walk--Bill did, anyway--from our apartment in Monteverde Vecchio, 6.4 google map kms (3-3/4 miles one way): down via dei Quattro Venti, right on via Portuense, across via Isacco Newton, left on via del Trullo.  Voila!





Via Portuense is one of Rome's less fashionable streets, but even so, not without interest.  Early on we noticed (right) a building that had once been a gas station, perhaps a car wash. Many elements, frequently modified.  Concrete block, air conditioning, a covered terrace, a nice old wall, a tattered banner and, of course, graffiti.  In a curious way, a delight.

Further on, a sad memorial to a tragic accident: a young woman, Valentina, had died at that spot.













And two very different buildings, side by side: on the left, what appeared to be a municipal building, constructed in the 1930s; on the right, an apartment complex, perhaps of 1970s vintage, with its brazen rounded balconies.

An architectural find on via
dell'Imbreciatto.  Modernist
brutalism, recent vintage.  

Just beyond, we discovered a flaw in our plan.  Via Isacco Newton is an enormous highway, and there are no sidewalks on the fast-moving portion of via Portuense that crosses it.  Only Evil Knievel would walk that route.  So we doubled back to via Pietro Frattini and turned south through the 'hoods, onto via dell'Imbreciatto, right onto a country road, right again along Isacco Newton and over it, on a bridge, then up the hill and down the hill into Trullo.  Including the doubling back, this route is about 8.2 km, or roughly 5 miles.









Trullo has, indeed, been upgraded, as your exhausted duo discovered.  We didn't see any burning trash cans this time around.  Many of the 1930s housing project buildings that dominate the area have been decorated in one way or another: some simply and playfully--the kind of work that could be done by an untrained crew with a bit of direction. There's lots of poetry, too.




Others have benefited from the first-rate work by professionals.   Several examples follow.

Many other buildings, including the market, sport wall art.  At left, the decorated wall of an eyeglass store. Below, the market.

"The voyage is a search for hidden courage that knows no bounds."

View from the bar.

There's a comfortable bar in the center of town where you can sit outside on the covered patio and watch the main street traffic and the kids playing in the park across the street.  Best on a Saturday.

Worth it.  But don't walk.  We took the bus home. Weak!
Bill

PS - Posts on other areas 'upgraded' with street art include those on Quadraro and the Nomentana train station.  The book, "Global Rome" also investigates this phenomenon.

In Trullo, even the trucks are painted!  The graffiti on the building at center is older, not part of the remodeling. 

Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City. Book Review.

Foro Italico, one site of the 1960
Olympic Games

Is Rome a global city?  That's one of the claims--it's right there in title, Global Rome--made in this edited collection of 17 essays, subtitled Changing Faces of the Eternal City.  As Bjorn Thomassen and Piero Vereni point out in the first of the essays, it's certainly not a global financial city, or a global industrial city, but it is, arguably, the most "imagined" city in the world.

And, as the editors, Thomassen and Isabella Clough Marinaro emphasize, it's global in its tourism, as a locus of international diplomacy and, especially, in its growing number of immigrants, who now make up about 1/8 of the city's population.

Moreover, as Simon Martin's essay makes clear, Rome has been, and to some extent remains, a global sporting city, hosting the 1960 Olympic Games and the 2009 World Swimming Championships (in contrast, Mark Dyal's essay on romanità argues that the term's application to soccer was part of a larger effort to hold on to an older, traditional Rome threatened by multiculturalism, modernization--and globalization).

In a new shop near Piazza Vittorio, an Asian
family eats lunch

Curiously, there isn't much in the book about tourism or diplomacy or the imagining of Rome, and Michael Herzfeld's contribution makes the point that despite its increasingly global population, Rome as an immigration center is also characterized by "extreme localism"; Romans resent the newcomers.  Still, treatments of immigration are the focus of at least six of the essays.  Pierluigi Cervelli looks at several groups of new arrivals and at what he calls their "spatial practices."  The Chinese have prospered by buying property in the Esqulino--the area surrounding Piazza Vittorio--where they predicted property values would rise over time.  Bangladeshi settled a bit further out, in the near suburb of Torpignattara.  Romanians and Albanians occupy areas even farther outside the center, near and beyond the GRA to the north.  And the Roma have survived by being "invisible" to the authorities, living in underpasses and along river banks--and moving often.

Cinema Impero closed in 1983, before
the Bangladeshi arrived in Tor Pignattara

We were particularly interested in the experience of the Bangladeshi in Torpignattara, because we "discovered" and wrote about the area a few years ago and have since returned several times to explore its art galleries and its substantial array of graffiti.  Alessandra Broccolini presents the community as a "frontier," where over two decades the Italian population has been partly displaced and forced to accommodate an influx of Bangladeshi---about 5,000, most living in what is known to older residents as the  Marranella--that has led some to call the place "Banglatown."  As of 2007 about 25% of shops were run by the newcomers.  Lest one assume that the new immigrants led to the decline of the area, Broccolini points out that the area was hardly prospering before the Bangladeshi arrived--the striking, modernist movie house, the Cinema Impero, closed in 1983.  After the population influx, the crime rate declined and the crime rate declined and the street lighting improved.

Carlo Pisacane elementary school--the site of conflict
between Italians and Bangladeshi

Herzfeld's "extreme localism" appeared in Torpignattara in the form of the "Piscane Affair," a series of events swirling around the Carlo Pisacane School, attended by Bangaldeshi, Chinese, and Egyptian students--together, 115 of 140 students in one survey. The change led school authorities to cap foreign enrollment at Pisacane at 30% of the total.  As author Piero Vereni notes, the assignation "foreign" applied even to children born in Rome and fluent in Italian.  The Pisacane affair, he concludes, was about what it meant to be "Italian."

Via Boccea, one of the areas where Roma "settled".

The Roma are doubtless Rome's most despised immigrant group.  Tourists protect their wallets when they approach, and to most Italians they seem incapable of the hard work and community-building that would bring them into the mainstream.  They come off somewhat differently in two essays in this collection.  Marco Solimene presents the Xoraxanè Roma, immigrants from Yugoslavia beginning in the 1960s, as a determined and responsible group, one that cultivated relationships with the Italians who offered services the Roma needed: bars, Internet points, tobacconists, and the Trastevere train station, which served as a meeting place.  Some settled in the via Boccea area to the northwest, others out via Nomentana to the north, and the largest number in Rome's southwest, in Trullo, Corviale, Tor di Valle, Muratella, and especially Magliana, with its concentration of scrap iron dealers to whom Roma scavengers could sell.

Trullo's self-managed community center, "Ricomincio
dal Faro," operated by squatters.  Once a movie house.

In our more innocent days, we explored the massive housing project at Corviale and, more recently, spent an afternoon in Trullo, watching trash cans burn and admiring what we learned--from this book--was a self-managed community center created by squatting (occupato) in an abandoned movie theater.

And, having lived in the Marconi district and across the river in San Paolo, we were eager to learn

Squatters still live tucked away on the grounds
of the now-defunct Testaccio slaughterhouse.  

more about the Roma who had been living nearby.  Ulderico Daniele and editor Marinaro tell two stories involving the Roma, both about evictions.  One features Roma living under Ponte Marconi and on vicolo Savini in Ostiense, both evicted and moved by the city to Pomezia, 25 km away and far from their closest community settlement.  Another group, evicted from an unauthorized camp in 2011, took refuge in the Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura--and, for several days, refused to leave.  That group ended up at an authorized camp in via Salaria, on the other side of the city.

For Daniele and Marinaro, these episodes are typical of authorities' efforts to clear areas deemed valuable--such as vicolo Savini and the Testaccio slaughterhouse--and give them over
to private developers.  Cristina Lombardi-Diop tells a similar story, and a similarly depressing one, of some 2,000 Senegalese immigrants, happily and productively renting apartments in 5 buildings in "Residence Roma" near Forte Bravetta, yet forced to relocate--to Ladispoli, Pomezia, Centocelle, and Torpignattara--to make way for single-family villas.  The mayor at the time was left-center Walter Veltroni, who wrote the foreword to our first book.

This account of evictions is one of several in the collection that deal interestingly with the ugly Rome politics of housing and homelessness.  One the one hand, the city's interest in cultural heritage protection--argues Valerie Higgins--has emptied central Rome of Italians (only 100,000 live in the Centro Storico, a term that didn't exist until 1960), marginalizing locals and making the core "more like a museum" than a living community.  To find an authentic Rome--that is, areas inhabited by Romans--she adds, you have to go the suburbs and even the periphery--the subject, we self-servingly add, of Rome the Second Time and Modern Rome and, especially, of this blog.

On the other hand, failure of the city authorities to develop a reasonable and coherent housing policy has led to something of a frontier mentality in areas distant from the center and has played into the hands of unscrupulous or short-sighted developers.  Carlo Cellamare labels Rome "The Self-Made City" because so much of its periphery has undergone "development by improvisation"--housing made by squatters in abandoned buildings or on public land, or just plain illegal building, sometimes on a grand scale.  The Valle Borghesiana, between via Prenestina and via Casilina and about 7 km beyond the GRA, is typical: a lot of building but no public space and minimal services--a few bars that take on a quasi-public function as meeting places.  Young people have only the mall.

Miles away on the coast sits the tiny community of Idroscalo, in recent years a symbol of Rome's dysfunctional housing policy.  Located just around the corner from the memorial to Pier Paolo

We've never been to Idrascalo, but it's just a stone's
throw from this small park, a memorial to Pier
Paolo Pasolini.

Pasolini (see our post, which has directions), this illegal, unauthorized "town" of 300 homes, all built on public land, continues to vex authorities, who have both allowed it to exist and expand and yet regularly threaten its residents with expulsion--presumably so that this valuable property could be "developed."  In the meantime, as Ferruccio Trabalzi writes, Idroscalo plugs along, its residents pleased to be on the sea, enjoying the sunsets, yet lacking shops, a library, city offices, a community center--even a piazza. In his essay on the Porta di Roma shopping center on Rome's periphery, Cellamare offers another case of service-deprivation, describing the enormous mall as a "black hole," sucking the life out of nearby housing areas.

Pierpaolo Mudu is equally critical of Rome's housing history, arguing that the failure to build housing--and better housing--is a matter of policy.  He dates the problem to l924, when the term "borgate" was coined and Acilia was built, far from the center.  Housing developers became key players  in the postwar era, building projects that were poorly constructed and, again, lacked services--like  Magliana, constructed along the Tevere in the 1960s.  A

The shopping center  in Torbellamonaca, a suburb
constructed as an "episode."

1962 housing law--housing law 167--produced Spinaceto, Corviale, Laurentino 38, and
Torbellamonaca--all constructed, writes Mudu, as "episodes," rather than as integrated parts  of Rome.  With the withdrawal of the public sector from the housing market after 1970, illegal (abusive) housing became common.  Rent controls were abolished in 1998.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Tufello, San Basilio, and Trullo became sites of resistance to these policies and practices, resistance to the "refusal of the political class to take on any responsibility."

Rome's dysfunctional policies on housing and land use have likely contributed to the inclination of Romans to abandon the public sphere for an insular retreat to the private sphere and family life.  Nonetheless, there have been

An occupied social center in Ostiense.  The facade is now
fully painted--by street artist Blu..  Inside, a cafe serves
tea, apertifs, and snacks.  

counter-developments, efforts to fashion a community experience.  Beginning in the 1970s, young people began to create social centers, many of them by occupying--that is, squatting in--unoccupied buildings.  As Mudu explains, most of these were created by the left (Angelo Mai, Garage, and Rialto), but a few--notably Casa Pound--were established by the right.  Today, some 34 social centers exist in Rome, and about half are legal.

Likely an illegal private garden, in the Parco della Cafferella--
that is, on public land.  

Other Romans have taken to farming without permission on public land; in 2011, there were
70 public gardens in Rome, and many communal gardens--all created in the absence of a coherent city policy.  Not to make money, as Ferruccio Trabalzi notes, but to foster community. 

Global Rome is a remarkable collection, a complex yet accessible mix that sheds light on little-understood aspects of a city whose cultural patrimony can overwhelm efforts to appreciate and understand its nuances.  It will have special appeal for scholars of modern Rome and for those interested in exploring beyond the historic center, and beyond the suburbs into the periphery.  Rome the third time, perhaps.

Bill  

Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City, ed. Isabella Clough Marinaro and Bjorn Thomassen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), is available through Indiana University Press [$32 paper, $27.99 eBook] and amazon [$27.56 paper, $16.40 eBook].

Trullo

Trullo in about 1940.  It was then called Villaggio Costanzo Ciano, after a notable Fascist.

'We live in Trullo, unfortunately.'
'Why unfortunately?' asked Blume.
'Well, Commissioner, it's not exactly the nicest part of the city, is it?'

That exchange is from Conor Fitzgerald's new detective novel, The Memory Key (2013).  Our Roman friend Massimo, who grew up off via Portuense about two miles from Trullo, confirms the impression, noting that in the 1960s and 1970s Trullo "was still considered a sort of Bronx," along withTor Marancia and the Donna Olimpia housing projects in Monteverde Nuovo.

Located a few miles to the south of Rome's center, between Magliana and Corviale--two other communities that are not "the nicest part of the city" either, Trullo retains more than a little of that "Bronx" feeling.  On the day we visited, we saw not one but two fires burning in the large public garbage cans that sit on the streets, probably set by the roaming groups of teenage boys with not much to do on a Sunday.  Massive towers carrying high-tension wires dominate what years ago was probably a nice park. But as we'll see, there's another side to Trullo.

There wasn't much of anything in the area until 1917, when an industrialist, Maccaferri Gaetano, acquired the land and opened a wire factory serving the war effort.  But the character of the place was not established until 1939, when the ICP (Istituto per le Case Popolari, or the Public Housing Association), an arm of the Fascist regime, acquired enough land to build 336 housing units, intended

for Italian colonists returning from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and other places in North Africa.  When Mussolini visited the following year, on the occasion of the 18th anniversary of the March on Rome, he was not impressed.  "These houses," he said, "resemble military barracks more than living quarters."  Or maybe that was high praise.  Appropriately, the village was then called Costanzo Ciano, after a former naval officer who had participated in the March on Rome and become the President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (1934-1939).


The Duce's judgment was not without reason, especially, perhaps, in those early days, before bushes and flowers emerged to temper the stucco buildings, row upon row of them, all the same or nearly so.  On the other hand, the treatments of the exterior spaces between the buildings differed,

One of the better kept outdoor spaces.

and most units had shared, and shaded, balcony/walkways, visible in the photos above and below.  

With the fall of Fascism the village of Costanzo Ciano became Duca d'Aosta (also of Great War fame) and then Trullo, a name derived from an ancient Roman tomb located on the right bank of the Tevere, along the old via Campana. 

Move back a few paces and you can't see the church. 

Despite the garbage fires, the electrical towers, and a general lack of maintenance that lend the place a gritty feel, Trullo is not without amenities and pleasures.  The Fascist-era church remains, a modernist evocation of the countryside--even if its sight lines have been intercepted by overgrown trees.









Bocce Circolo, for the village's older men

There's a newer market and, near it, several stores on the main street.  A small park, also quite new, centers the town and is well used by young and old.  A few blocks away, there's a bocce club (above).
 

What was long ago the town's hotel is now a graffiti-covered leftist circolo, but it seems clear that this colorful building is well and frequently used.  Next door a bar/restaurant, probably at one time part of the hotel, offers a covered patio, table service, and a great vantage point to survey the scene. According to the website Roma a piedi (Rome on foot)--the source for some of the information in this post--Trullo is a multi-ethnic community, though to our eyes it looked mostly Italian.

On a hill a few hundred feet south of the bar, newer apartment buildings suggest the arrival in recent decades of a small middle class, and we found posted notice (right) of a gathering to announce a new book on the village's history, a sign of Trullo's pride in its past.   

Bill 

Trullo's Main Street.  At right, just out of view, the park.  The church bell tower is visible.
 Straight ahead and a bit to the right, the market.  At left, stores.  Not much action on a Sunday.