Ballad of the Aegean Sea: Patrizio Nissirio's new Historical Mystery

A little-known World War II war crime on a Greek Island is a major focus of a fascinating first novel by Patrizio Nissirio, an accomplished journalist and author.

The book's title, Una Ballata del Mare Egeo/A Ballad of the Aegean Sea, does not reveal its ties to Rome. However, the novel's protagonist, himself a young journalist, was born and raised in Rome's Piazza Bologna area (the setting for two of Rome the Second Time's 15 itineraries).  And it is from this mid-century, middle-class quartiere of Rome that the story unfolds. The journalist-protagonist, like the author, is of Greek descent, and he traces his family's history back to those Greek Islands that were the last part of Greece to be reclaimed - in 1945 -  after Italy invaded Greece and the Axis powers then occupied it.

Nissirio expertly weaves the story of Italians on the Greek Islands in World War II with present-day desires to explore one's family roots and the origins of right-wing nostalgia.  The mystery is fascinatingly complex and fun to follow.  Even more fascinating for me is the history on which the novel is based.  The book definitely will appeal to those who like "true crime" stories.

Nissirio's visceral love for Greece jumps from the pages of the book, as does his knowledge of the Greek islands.  These islands even today bear witness to significant signs of Italian colonization (if I can call it that), with their Fascist-era town plans and buildings that remain.

Kudos to Nissirio for a story well-told, history well-revived, and a good read.

Ah, yes, the question of language.  The book to date is available only in Italian, from amazon.it.  For those of us whose knowledge of the language is less than perfect, it is a surprisingly easy read.  And hopefully a translation and movie rights are in the book's future!

Una Ballata del Mare Egeo is available on amazon.it.

Patrizio Nissirio

Nissirio has spent most of his career with ANSA, the Italian news service, with long assignments (as in 4-6 years) in Washington, DC., Athens, and London. He is director of ANSAMed,  ANSA's multilingual information service for the Mediterranean.   He has written several nonfiction books, including one on the Greek economy.  Full disclosure: Patrizio Nissirio is a long-time friend of ours.  He helped us secure Walter Veltroni's (then a recent mayor of Rome) introduction to Rome the Second Time.  And, he introduced us to much of the Piazza Bologna area.

Dianne

Pasolini Remembered: The Ostia Murder Site

The legendary Pier Paolo Pasolini--poet, novelist, filmmaker, sociologist, intellectual--moved to Rome with his mother at age 28, in 1950.  His residences there include two in Monteverde Vecchio, where plaques commemorate one of the city's most admired, and most controversial, figures.



We never fail to enjoy these reminders of Pasolini's presence, but we hadn't yet visited the site in Ostia, not far from the beach, where Pasolini was murdered--run over several times by his own automobile--on November 2, 1975. Apparently he had gone there to recover several stolen reels for his latest feature film.  The murder purportedly was solved, but large questions remain (the "murdered" retracted his confession, e.g.).




The site can be reached by car or scooter (directions at end of this post) --or by bus it would seem; there's a bus stop, Idroscalo, right across the road.  Although the beach is just down the road, the area has several small businesses.  We parked our scooter across the street, and approached the park.

Although there's a sign suggesting that the park has official sanction, we found it hemmed in by impregnable fencing on all sides, a chain and lock securing the front gate, the only entrance.











We sighed, took some pictures through the fence, resigned ourselves to a less than fully successful effort, and returned to our scooter.  The owner of Oriflex, a manufacturer of mattresses, was taking a smoke break in the front of his complex. We approached and struck up a conversation, lamenting the fact that the Pasolini park was closed and locked.

One of these links is a caribiner that
can be opened easily.

He paused, as if wondering if he should continue, then explained that the lock and chain was a kind of ruse, a fake ("finta"), that one of the links could be opened, and with it, the gate.  And we could walk in.








And so, following his instructions, we did.  It's a somewhat scruffy place, haphazardly maintained, lacking elegance and grandeur.  A large white, modernist monument to Pasolini, in the back of the park, seems not to do justice to the man and his life; indeed, it appears awkwardly out of place.

That said, Pasolino's poetry--all in Italian--is nicely represented here, affixed to rocks along the park's narrow paths, and several of his major works are remembered in surface tablets.



We spent a few minutes remembering Pasolini's many contributions, lamenting his early death.  We "locked" the gate behind us, and headed home.



Bill












Directions:  From the Pyramid, take via Ostiense [via del Mare] south.  It briefly becomes viale dei Romagnoli, then again becomes via del Mare/via Ostiense.  After passing a Cineland Multiplex on the right, turn right at via di Aqua Rossa, which curves left and becomes via delle Azzorre.  Via delle Azzorre intersects and angles right onto via dell'Idroscalo.  Look for the park on the left, or the Oriflex sign on the right.  The trip takes 35 to 45 minutes by car or scooter.

The Story of Zippo

Free Zippo, with schematic fasce below

Zippo Libero/Free Zippo.  If, like RST, you walk the streets of Rome's outlying neighborhoods, you'll now and then see the words Zippo Libero written on a wall.  And Zippo is not purely of local, neighborhood interest. 

Zippo (right)

The 23-year-old young man was the subject of a well-atttended march on via dei Fori Imperiali, obviously undertaken with city approval, the marchers uniformed in white T-shirts decorated with the Zippo Libero slogan.  And on December 5 of last year, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in protest outside the Regina Coeli prison, where Zippo was being held. 

Siamo quello che Facciamo (We are what we do).
A CasaPound sticker attached to a light pole near
Stadio Olimpico. Looks like the mascot is
a turtle. 

Zippo, whose real name is Alberto Palladino, is a right-wing militant and activist, with ties to rightist organizations, including the Blocco Studentesco (Student Bloc) and CasaPound, which takes its name from the American poet Ezra Pound who, living in Italy and enamoured with Mussolini's Fascism, made hundreds of radio broadcasts citicizing the United States during World War II. 

1930s public housing in Monte Sacro

The event that landed Zippo in jail took  place on the night of November 3, 2011, in via dei Prati Fiscali, a major thoroughfare in Monte Sacro, a hilly, middle- and working-class neighborhood north of the Center.  According to the Carabinieri, who happened by that evening, Palladino was one of 15 men who, with their faces covered and armed with wooden clubs and "mazze ferrate" (iron cudgels) set upon five members of the youth movement of the Democratic Party (PD) who had just moments before finished with some postering--a common activity among political youth groups.  Four persons, all affiliated with the PD, required hospital treatment. 

Marchionne Infame (Infamy)

Palladino was identified as one of the aggressors by Paolo Marchionne, head of the PD in the Monte Sacro area (how he made that identification is not clear), and Zippo was arrested in early December, on his return to Italy from Thailand, where he was doing volunteer work. 

Zippo Libero March.

Despite the marches and protests, Zippo was convicted of assault and battery and in early July, 2012, was sentenced to 2 years and 8 months of house arrest (domicilio coatto) in Ronciglione, a town between Rome and Viterbo were he had previously lived.  At the sentencing, Palladino's mother confronted Marchionne, the only one who had identified Zippo as among the aggressors. 




CasaPound, which occupied a small building near the scene of the November 3 confrontation, claimed the arrest was "purely political," a reponse to Palladino's social activism.  The source of the identification--a political operative on the left--would lend credence to that claim.  Even so, an armed assault took place, 4 young men were injured, and Zippo, given his strong political convictions, may have been among those wreaking havoc.

Zippo Libero?  Maybe, maybe not.

Bill 
Two other posts on right-wing graffiti incude one centered in Piazza Vescovio and one generally deciphering Rome's walls.

A "Zippo Libero" sign makes an appearance among extreme
soccer fans (Ultras)

The Gates of Rome: The Postwar Era

Some of these gates are best seen--and photographed--at night. 

A window barred--but elegantly, c. 1910

From the point of view of crimes against the body, Rome is a safe city, with very low numbers of assaults, rapes and murders.  Property crime--things like thefts on the bus, breaking and entering with intent to steal the television set--is more frequent.  Romans--and Italians generally--are understandably anxious about property crimes and eager to protect their homes from invasion.  Hence Romans prefer the upper floors of apartment buildings, where they feel--and are--less vulnerable, and those who must live on the ground or first floor commonly install bars on windows. 

Fenced in, completely

Some have been known to fence in an entire terrace or balcony (right).  Portieri--the guys who sit in little rooms ready to jump out and prevent you from snooping around in that lovely interior courtyard--are less common than they once were, but they're still at work here and there, and they still serve as a deterrent to crime in many buildings.   If a thief does manage to get to your front door, he must deal with multiple sets of multiple-bolt locks on an order that even a hardened New Yorker would have trouble imagining.  Opening one of these doors with the keys requires not only a good memory--for which key fits which lock,  which of the locks, if any, is a fake, which lock to unlock first, how many turns to make--but also a non-arthritic wrist and some time to waste. 



A fanciful gate, in Coppede'

This concern for home safety has one benefit (well, maybe more than one): the iron gates that guard many buildings--the first line of defense, especially in the absence of a portiere--are works of art.  Some are centuries old, veritable masterpieces of the Italian renaissance.  Others, as in the Coppede' neighborhood in the quartiere of Trieste, evoke the medieval sensibilities of Gino Coppede', the architect who built the area, or offer a touch of the "liberty"/art nouveau style that was in vogue in the decades before and after 1900. (The Coppede' neighborhood came in at #20 on RST's Top 40.)

Then there are the modern gates of the between-the-wars Fascist period, with their strong vertical and/or horizontal lines.  No nonsense. 










Here's another, from the 1920s, with touches of the medieval: that spear to the right, the grate-like general appearance.  Nestled in the center, the modernist letters CP (Case Popolari/Public Housing).  This gate is in the planned community of Garbatella (RST's #16 on its Top 40), south of the center. 







And after the war?  Nothing worth looking at, right?  Wrong.  We (and that really means Bill, that master of the perverse perspective) have been enjoying the gates and doors of the 1950s and 1960s.  Yikes!  At least that's when we think they were made; they don't come with dates. 

Angles, colored glass, lovely shadows.  Note the floor.  This
gate is "busier" than most.  You can see it in Piazza Vescovio.

They're easy to recognize: they're "modern" in the sense that they (usually) aren't busy with detail, and they don't resemble Victorian wallpaper.  But the designers of these postwar examples have moved on just a bit from the stark lines favored in the Fascist era.  Lines are bending (photo at top).  New angles.  Playfulness.  One senses a search--not always successful, we admit--for something beyond the stark order of modernism.









Playful, yet bold and powerful.  Straight out of the 1950s, and strong and masculine.  In postwar, modern Garbatella, not far from the Metro. 

Sensational.  Gorgeous.  You could be in Miami Beach.  But it's Monteverde. 

We found this gem in the quartiere of Trieste, while walking to our
apartment from Piazza Bologna.  Wasted on a parking lot, but dazzling.
We're thinking Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome. 

There's Fuller with his dome. 

Bill






 

Caged in Rome

A Man's Home is his Castle, and if Romans had their way, every home would be surrounded by a moat. Romans live mostly in apartments. The doors to the units usually have multiple locks with massive keys that turn a raft of thick bolts into chambers on the second door and into the floor and ceiling. Sometimes one of the locks is fake, apparently to fool would-be intruders into thinking the place impenetrable. Outside, first floor windows are invariably guarded by dense roll-down shutters and formidable wrought-iron bars with locks.

Still, we were surprised by the lengths to which one resident of the Aventine (see above) had gone to protect his balcony from invasion. Bill

Torpignattara: Neighborhood on the Verge of....

We were intrigued by Laura Serloni's story in La Repubblica on the outlying neighborhood of Torpignattara, which lies east of the train station and the closer-in, now-hip community of Pigneto. The headline for the piece described Torpignattara as "dimenticata" (forgotten), and Serloni's story labeled its outdoor market "degrado" (degraded) and mentioned that the zone had no parks and that its 1930s movie theater (the only one in the area) was in disrepair, having long ago closed its doors.

We had been through the neighborhood many times, but only on the thoroughfare of via Casilina (the cross-street at top left), with a tram running through its center that cramps traffic in both directions. Until now, Torpignattara was for us a neighborhood to get through on our way to the campagna Romana.

So we went out there and walked around. We found the boarded-up movie theatre--perhaps no gem even when new--and ambled through the metal-shed market, which at 12:45 (some of the stands may have closed up, and the fish stands don't operate on Thursday) was occupied only here and there.
But we would add that older markets of this kind often have a forlorn appearance--one might as well use the words "rustic," or "authentic," or "comfortable"--and otherwise petty capitalism seemed to be thriving in this 'hood, sustained on some streets (e.g., via della Marranella) by communities of dark-skinned new immigrants, whose place of origin we failed to identify.

Although the oldest buildings in the neighborhood appear to date from about 1900, Torpignattara's architectural plant is also sustained by a number of structures built, like the theatre, in the 1930s, and datable by dates on the buildings,
sometimes presented in the Fascist system, which starts with 1922, the year of the March on Rome. Some of these buildings could use plastering and a coat of paint, but others have been nicely redone. The school at the corner of via dell' Acqua Bullicante and via Policastro has the solid, decent design of Fascist-era rationalist architecture.

The area will also benefit from the new "C" Metro line, now being built just a few blocks to the north under via Maletesta, once a lovely parkway but now a massive cantieri (construction project). The new Metro line is actually in Labicano, but it will provide reliable transportation to most of Torpignattara's residents. And given that, it may not be all that long before the word "gentrification" rears its ugly head and those nasty wine bars appear (there are none now).
We found what may be the early signs of that sort of redevelopment along the alley-like street of via Auconi, where smaller homes are being renovated (right).

We did find one small, usable, functioning park, off via del Pigneto at via dei Zeno (if we recall correctly).
It was being mowed, apparently for the first time this year (below right), with an actual power lawn mower (one of several in Rome; they are as rare here as Velveeta).

The problem with the parks, we think, is related to the city's program of underground parking lots. Once built, the lots are supposed to have parks at ground level.

But one of these parks (below left)had gone to tall, unmowable weeds, as if the city had been preparing the site for drug traffic and crime. In the circular entrance to that park's underground garage someone had fashioned a creche out of concrete, perhaps to offer comfort to those intrepid enough to use the facility (lower left).

The other, pictured in Serloni's article, had been fenced off. It would take an American neighborhood, with the help of the Lion's Club, about two weeks to have such a place up and running, with swing sets and redwood walkways and the like. But there is no Lion's club in Italy, and no tradition of voluteerism. And the government has failed to do anything but build the parking garages. Here it's all about cars.

Bill