Things SHE misses in Rome - part I

 

1. Statues to tax guys! This one, to Quintino Sella, Minister of Finance for the new Republic, 1869-1873, statue in front of the Ministry of Finance in Rome...

(1. a.) complete with naked people at its base - I'm sure they're some kind of mythological figures who loved collecting taxes.

(One of our favorite tax man statues was featured in an earlier post here.)   

2. Creative ways to advertise     

    

3. Holes in the formidable Roman Aurelian walls or views through other Roman buildings that make one think of a James Turrell skyspace. (We've also found those elsewhere in Rome, here, and here.)

4. Weird exhibitions of ...well...in this case, Tupperware (with the theme of bringing color to a piazza near you).

Dianne   

Sweet Guest: 2019's Ad Campaign of the "Year"

When we're in Rome we read the Rome edition of one of Italy's national newspapers. These days we're reading Il Messaggero, mostly for its local coverage of city issues, from the garbage problem to the closing of Metro stations.  Now and then we are also attracted to an ad campaign.

This year's favorite advertising campaign featured a company known as "Sweet Guest," which apparently has a relationship to the home rental company Airbnb.  Most of the Sweet Guest ads ask, "Do you want to get more from your rented apartment?"  The company offers to help the owner value the property correctly, and it manages the rental, freeing the owner, as the ad says, from all worries.

Our interest in the ads had little to do with the company's purpose or business model, and much to do with the old folks used in the ads--the same man and woman every time--and the way they were presented.  Over two months, we found 4 different ads.  The first one is at the top of the post.  Here  are the others, in chronological order:

The ad directly above makes a somewhat different pitch: "You've hit the ground running, now you can only accelerate."  Beyond the words, our first reaction was that the characters in the ads were simply designed to attract attention, because they're so different--and not just in age--from the younger people that dominate advertising.

On second thought, the ads seemed to be targeted at the older people who, in a rapidly aging Italy, own the majority of Rome apartments.  They suggest--possibly, we're not sure--that if you use Sweet Guest, you'll have time for, and be in a relaxed mood for, leisure pursuits: playing basketball (make sure to wear goggles), serving donuts in your stylish clothes, riding a motorcycle (without helmets), and....well, we're not sure what's going on with the short-sleeved, striped 1980s shirts, white undershirts, and winter hats--maybe just enjoying one's bad taste.

Bill

Hogre: What's Hogre?

OK.  What's Hogre?  As this 2018 (San Lorenzo) image suggests, Hogre's a street artist, specializing in stencils and, more recently, in large posters.  Many of his early stencils feature Hogre's face, and it's likely that this What's Hogre? image is, indeed, Hogre--though perhaps years ago.  We would guess he's more like 40 now.

Hogre is from Rome, and we first encountered his work in 2010 (but heard about him as early as 2009), when we found this image of an angry, "I can't take it anymore" Hogre.

In these "early" years, Hogre's work was satiric, but quite unassuming--small in size and muted in
tone--though always identified as "Hogre."  Here are some other Hogre stencils and pasteups we found in Rome:

Achtung (2013).  Tor Pignattara.

Not sure what this has to do with Spam.  The image appears to be of the Vatican,
with a devil-like octopus hovering above.  Hogre was never fond of the Catholic Church, as
we shall see later.  2015

An Asian temple (?), atop the Coliseum. 

Ego, 2013.  Looks too old to be Hogre, as does "Achtung" (above).

Relaxing with a bottle of something.  Ostiense underpass, 2014.

"Look Inside Yourself."

Hogre's most famous (or infamous) Rome moment occurred in 2017, when he was arrested at an internet cafe in the city, charged under an obscure Italian law with a "public offense to religion," a crime carrying with a fine of up to 5,000 Euro and/or a 2-year jail term.  Hogre's sin was to use a bus stop advertising space for his "Ecce homo erectus (left, below) featuring Jesus with an erection emerging under his robe, his hand on the head of a boy kneeling before him.  Scandalous!  Hogre explained that the poster was a response to sexual abuse charges against Cardinal Pell, a high-ranking Vatican official.

"Ecce homo erectus" (left)

More recently, Hogre has been working in Warsaw and London, the latter a city he identifies with his new nemesis, the advertising industry.  "I declared war on kitsch supremacy, embodied in the ads, and definable as the refusal of everything that is considered unacceptable.  And London is the capital of this aesthetic ideal."  Put another way, Hogre detests the way today's advertising of "brand identities" suffocates individual identity.  Guy DeBord and Max Stirner are among his intellectual influences.

His campaign against the messaging of the ad industry (and those who use that industry, including government agencies) is carried out in two ways, each very different from the simple stencils that characterized his early work in Rome. One technique is to tear away at existing posters (or locating posters that have been torn--not difficult), then superimposing the text "SUBVERTISING" (that is, subverting advertising).  This technique appears to be an aspect of what Hogre calls "creative vandalism."

Hogre's second technique, more widely employed, is to replace existing posters--the standard ones, covered in glass and locked, mostly at bus stops, sometimes inside subway cars--with his own posters.  This work is usually accomplished with a group of co-conspirators, equipped with the 4-headed key required to gain access to the glassed-in, bus-stop posters.

Here's an example from Warsaw:

And one from London:

Much of Hogre's work is political.  One poster, mounted in Greenwich, featured an advertisement for Titan Deportation Charter Flights, with the slogan, "For Your Safety on Board You Had Better Be White."  Another, below, features the London police and the theme, "Help Keep Your Neighbourhood Paranoid."

"Social cleansing," also London.  Below, a worker imagines himself being swept away with masses:

Asked "What's next for Hogre," the artist replied, "I would love to shit on the tomb of Goebbels, and his legacy."  Stay tuned.  Hogre is not dead:

Looks like Rome

Bill

Hogre has recently published a limited edition book, Subvertising: The Piracy of Outdoor Advertising (Dog Section Press - "we make books with bite" - sold out as of this writing).  Much of his work can be viewed on Flickr.

Jessica Stewart's Street Art Stories Roma featured Hogre.

Saving Rome's Buildings, with Capitalism

Rome is being repaired--building by building, monument by monument. Signs of this effort are ubiquitous: one structure after another covered in canvas, and behind it, scaffolding.  The Trevi fountain, emptied of its water for months while reconstruction crews do their thing.  Restoration work on both of Rome's coliseums: the ancient, famous one in the city center, and the Colosseo Quadrato (square coliseum), an elegant Fascist-era building in EUR. 

This is mostly good news; at least some of Rome's historic structures are finally getting the care they need.  The bad news is that these reconstruction efforts come with strings attached.  The core of the problem is that much of the restoration work--just how much cannot be gleaned from newspaper reports--is funded by corporations.  The corporations want something for their money, hence the strings.  One string (a minor one, to be sure) is that whatever company is funding the project gets to put its name, or its product, or both on the cloth that shrouds the buildings and the scaffolding.  While undergoing repairs, the building becomes an advertisement, a billboard.  Americans are used to billboards and other very large advertisements, and may even regard them as essential to a vibrant urban scene.  This is surely true in Los Angeles, where notice of the latest blockbuster film may occupy the entire side of a very tall building.  Romans, however, have no billboard history that I know of, no experience until recently, as wall art has achieved a certain popularity, with visual clutter akin to advertising gigantism.

Yet there it is.  An ad for Jaguar looming over Largo di Santa Susanna.  More than one pitch for a company known as Mediolanum, which apparently has something to do with banking.

A huge picture of the latest Samsung Galaxy phone (probably the one that catches fire and is no longer being produced), positioned between Piazza Venezia and Hadrian's column. 

Ads for the New Tiguan--that's an automobile--dominating the Tiber end of via della Conciliazione.




An enormous ad for the second season of the TV series "Gomorra" on the historic Palazzo della Cancelleria (see the top of this post).  So that's one "string" attached: visual pollution.  It's advertising, not art.

The other string is more interesting, and arguably more disturbing.  The corporations that do this work not only want to advertise while they're doing it.  They also want--and get--a degree of control over the property whose restoration they're funding.  That brings us to Fendi, a company with Roman roots, and one known for many years for its fashionable furs.  Beginning a few years ago, the company embarked on a plan to restore several of the city's best-known fountains, beginning with the Trevi, where the company invested about $2.9 million.  The restoration was completed in the fall of 2015, just in time, as it happens, for Fendi's 90th anniversary.  To mark that occasion, in July 2016 the company drained the fountain, installed a 66-yard-long glass catwalk, filled the Trevi again--and, in a sunset display of haute couture, brought out 37 models, who seemed to walk on water.

That spectacle, which allowed the company to identify its brand with one of the world's great attractions, continues to benefit Fendi.  On the following November 15, the company featured the July event in a two-page spread in the New York Times. 

One could reasonably argue that's a good deal for Rome, Romans, and tourists: a landmark spruced up, used for an evening by its benefactor, powerful images of the Trevi circulating in the media. 

More problematic is what's happened recently in EUR, where Fendi is also involved, this time with the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana--the iconic "square coliseum."  Apparently as a reward for financial assistance with repairs to the building (we're assuming that), Fendi was able to rent the building for 15 years for 240,000 Euro per month.  Under the agreement with EUR Spa, a public entity, Fendi also became the exclusive licensee of commercial images of the square coliseum for that same 15-year period. 

All this came to light, at least for us, when a gay pride organization, Roma Pride, used the building  as a backdrop for its publicity--3 guys in bikinis on the stairs, framed by the building's many arches. Fendi didn't like it. The cultural minister sided with Fendi: it was OK to sell the rights to commercial images, and not OK for Roma Pride to use the image of the Square Coliseum for commercial purposes.  And there the issue stands: symbolic, if nothing else, of corporate encroachment on Rome's historical heritage, for better or for worse, or both.

Bill

Why you don't have to go to Rome in the Spring

It's April, May, or early June, and airfares to Rome are high.  Too high.  You're worried you can't afford the trip.  Relax.  You don't have to be in Rome to know what's going on there.  Without opening a newspaper or checking online, you can be sure that the following will take place:

--Romans in one section of the city or another will complain about the "movida"--that is, late-night public partying by large groups of young people.  These complaints are especially likely to come from residents of San Lorenzo, Testaccio, Campo de' Fiori, Pigneto, and the area around Ponte Milvio.

--A young tourist will have used a tool of some sort to gouge a piece out of a public monument, carve an initial, or otherwise deface one of the city's treasures. 

Rome garbage is eternal. The photo was taken
in Tor Bella Monaca.

--Citizens will be outraged that once again the city has failed properly to collect garbage, allowing it to accumulate in large piles around city bins and elsewhere.  The mayor will issue a vague statement that he's working on the problem.  Mayors will come and go, but Rome's garbage is forever.


--Romans will be on holiday most of the time, or so it seems, celebrating every aspect of their long and complex history: unification, the Republic, the day when Rome was freed from German occupation, various canonizations, and so on.  When these holidays fall on a Thursday or Tuesday, the Friday after or the Monday before - or both a Friday and Monday - will also be holidays, resulting in a long weekend of play called a "ponte"--that is, a "bridge."  In common parlance, a "ponte" translates as "long weekend." 


--There will be complaints and newspaper stories about the high cost of going to the beach--mostly about renting a space and an umbrella.


--Romans will become sick of tourists, even before the peak of the season, loathing especially the big, ugly tour buses that clog the narrow streets, pollute the air, and park in large numbers where they shouldn't.  At the same time, and without a hint of irony, there will be gnashing of teeth over the decline of tourism in Rome. 

--Alitalia, the national airline, will be in the news, grappling with its decline.

Neighbors complained about this "abusivo" sidewalk sale near
San Giovanni in Laterano.

--Various forms of "abusivo"--basically, illegal--stuff will come under attack: abusivi street vendors, abusivi restaurant tables that extend into narrow streets, abusivi additions to the roofs of buildings, abusivi homes in the countryside, abusivi advertising panels, abusivo parking, especially by "i big"--that is, people who drive, or are driven in, expensive cars and think they're privileged. Not too long ago, at a meeting on via Nazionale, about a dozen bankers used the street for their Mercedes and BMWs, their cars jutting out at a right angle--into a critical thoroughfare where parking of any sort is absolutely prohibited.  Nothing, or almost nothing, will be done about any of this. 

"Prati, the abandoned city: 'a bazaar of street sellers invade streets
and sidewalks'"

--Lots will be written about corruption, at all levels.  This year, a postal employee who drove a delivery truck was found to be carrying mail not delivered for four years.

Anticipating a June 6 strike of thousands of government
workers

--The unions will go on strike, creating "caos" in the city.  The newspapers will describe the city as "in tilt."  It will, indeed, be hard to get around during these "scioperi"--strikes--that seem to occur several times a month.  It will be impossible to determine if those behind the strikes are really getting screwed, or if the unions are screwing everyone else.


So stay home.  You know what's going on.
Bill

According to the story, some large, abusivi advertising boards had already been torn down, and four thousand more
were going to be.  We recently noticed that a long string of cartelloni on the Gianicolo, at the side of Acqua Paolo,
had indeed been removed.    

 

A new role for the Mona Lisa

               The Mona Lisa, appearing in an advertisement for the treatment of tumors at a                                                                                   medical center.

The 6-legged dog: the story of Eni's famous logo

Eni's 6-legged dog, on a gas pump at a station on Rome's tangenziale, 2014

If you've motored around Italy for any length of time, you're familiar with one of the nation's most well-known logos: the 6-legged dog--part dog and dragon, actually--that breathes fire.  It's the logo for Eni--Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi--the enormous Italian oil and gas company, founded in February 1953 and headquartered in Rome.

A bit of romance while filling up

The story of the logo is well known, but too good not to tell again.  In 1952, with Eni's founding just around the corner, the company's CEO-to-be, Enrico Mattei, was convinced that the country needed to be sold on the idea that the oil fields of the Po Valley were sufficient to fuel Italy's industrial boom.  To find the right symbol for that effort, he offered 10 million lire as the prize in a competition to design logos for two products: the gasoline known as Supercortemaggiore, after the best known of the oilfields; and Agipgas, the company's gasoline outlets. The jury was composed of some of the most creative artistic minds of the generation: Gio Ponti, Mario Sironi, Mino Maccari and Antonio Baldini.  

The winner of the Supercortemaggiore contest, chosen from over 4,000 entries, was the 6-legged dog, the vision of sculptor, artist, and designer Luigi Broggoni.  Within months it was widely disseminated, appearing in magazines and newspapers, on billboards, and on the company's gas stations.  

An Agip station at Cortemaggiore, mid-1950s

Indeed, it quickly came to stand for a new type of gas station, high modernist in design and offering restaurant services as well as "powerful Italian petrol."  

Ettore Scola--soon to be directing some of Italy's best known films but then writing copy in Agipgas' advertising department--invented the slogan "il cane a sei zampe fedele amico dell'uomo a quattro ruote": the six-legged dog, loyal friend of four-wheeled man.  Eni has suggested that the 6 legs represent the sum of the automobile's 4 wheels and the driver's 2 legs.  

The dog inside the square, 1972

Broggoni's design has been modified at least twice and probably several times.  In 1972, the Unimark agency, working on turning the logo into a trademark, put the dog into a yellow square with rounded corners, a solution that required shortening the dog somewhat.  In a 1998 or later treatment, the dog came out of the box.

Bill

Betty Boop: 1930s icon in Rome and Italy

Betty Boop joins an old Pepsi-Cola sign in an ordinary bar on Rome's outskirts, the "borgata" (something akin to lower class neighborhood) or quarter of Alessandrino (named for the ancient Roman acqueduct that ran nearby).
 Across the street is one of the Vatican's new churches - San Francesco di Sales. 

Rome, and Italy, have long embraced American popular culture and its iconography, with special attention to Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Mickey Mouse, and Snow White.  More surprising, perhaps, is the attention given to a less well-known cartoon character from the dawn of talkies: Betty Boop. 

We found this Betty Boop in the northern Italian city of Trieste. 
Large hips, small breasts, and lots of leg on this version.  Too sexy for Rome. 

We'll spare you the details of Betty's history--the coverage on Wikipedia rivals that of the Kennedy assassination--but here's the gist of it:  Ms. Boop was a Great Depression-era persona.  She made her first appearance on the silver screen in August 1930, in the cartoon Dizzy Dishes, created by Max Fleischer as a caricature of the real-life singer Helen Kane.  In this incarnation, Betty was highly sexual yet girlish (she was officially 16), naïve and innocent--even a bit frightened about what might be out there--a well-stacked and curvaceous version of the jazz-age flapper. 

She originally had "poodle" ears, but those became earrings in Any Rags (1932), and in 1934, with the advent of the Production Code, Betty was transformed into a more mature and wiser husbandless housewife, dressed more modestly--soon to be without the earnings.  The final Betty Boop cartoon--there were over 100--appeared in 1939.  The character was revived in the 1980s for television and the comic strip, and Betty made an appearance in the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  Marketers became interested in Betty at the same time, and her image--usually the ultra-sexy early Boop--became widely used in advertising and in the collectibles market, both in the United States and abroad.  Though most of Betty's cartoons have not been released in the modern era, 22 are in the public domain and available on the Internet.   Bill

A Betty Boop shirt, Rome (Tuscolano quarter) store window.  With earrings--and garters.  Betty as gold-digger.   

Daniel Gelo, San Paolo

Here at RST we've decided we're done with the "best gelato in Rome" debate.  We played that game in our book, Rome the Second Time, and we've been sorry ever since.  In the short run we regretted our choice; in the long run, we came to the conclusion that the question isn't interesting enough to justify all the answers and opinions.  Chorus: "You elitist snobs!  The people who love ice cream are the people who buy your book!"

Anyway, thanks to Katie Parla, we recently found a gelato place worth writing about.  It's in the San Paolo area, about 5 minutes from the Metro stop by the same name, and if you're a gelato freak you can find it easily enough, using the address on the sign in the photo at the end of this post. 

The name is Daniel Gelo.  The shop intrigued us because it's got an old-fashioned, but not old-timey, look.  It's just a shop.  Lots of flavors, including "Spaghettti Gelato" and some frozen things, presented in a semi-chaotic setting featuring lots of hand-lettered signs. 









The gelato is gelato: tasty, and better than most everything in the States.  It's made right there in the back of the shop. Where Daniel Gelo ranks among

Rome's hundreds of ice creams parlors we have no idea--and palates that would not be of much help in finding out.












One distinguishing feature of the shop is a sign on the front window (below).  It looks like it's from the Chiquita Banana/Lena Horne era of the 1950s.  But it's probably more recent.  You won't find a sign like that elsewhere in Rome, or for that matter, in the U.S.   Bill

                      "Sempre Aperto"--literally "always open."  Take that with a grain of salt.