Tufello: A Rebel Community

Vigne Nuove--we started here - no "new vineyards" in sight. 

On a sunny day in mid-May, we got on the Honda Forza 300 and headed north to Vigne Nuove.  The name refers both to the quartiere/neighborhood of Vigne Nuove, and to one of Rome's largest public housing projects (above), this one from the 1970s. Our plan was to have a look at the housing project (which we did--we plan a full report in a future post), then walk south into Tufello, an older, more human-sized enclave just to Vigne Nuove's south. If you're not on a scooter or in a car, Tufello is accessible, at its southern end, by the relatively new Jonio stop (one beyond Conca d'Oro) on Metro's "B1" line (though some refer to waiting for a Metro B1 as "waiting for Godot"). Vigne Nuove means "new vineyards." We're not sure when it got its name, but the area obviously was at one point an agricultural area with vineyards, and ruins of a 1st-century AD villa have been found there. And "Jonio" is also spelled "Ionio" as in the Ionian Sea between Italy and Greece.

"Welcome to Tufello, a Free and Rebellious Quartiere" - note the "Welcome" is expressed in BOTH the masculine and
feminine plural (very PC), instead of using the masculine plural to refer to both males and females - the classic use.

Tufello's "charm" comes in part from its geographical confinement; it's essentially a triangle with one angle at the top, bounded on the south by Viale Jonio, on the west by via Giovanni Conti, and on the east by via delle Vigne Nuove. At its center is Piazza degli Euganei (see below).

Just north of that piazza, off via Monte Massico, we encountered several apartment buildings--probably dating to the late 1940s or 1950s. The courtyards were less than elegant--not unusual for "public" spaces in Rome.  A few of the apartments had air conditioning, but here, as elsewhere in the city, clothes are dried by hanging them in the sun.

A sparse, uninviting courtyard.  Dianne checks the map. Yes, a print map.

This interior space had nice pine trees, but was overgrown

On one of the buildings, an ode to "Fabio," now deceased, "nel paradiso degli eroi" ("in the paradise of heroes").

Tufello has a cultural center, the C.C.P., or Centro di Cultura Popolare, offering a Yoga experience.

At the end of several blocks of this older housing, a new, more modern building:

Some new investment in the area

The main piazza has a large, somewhat awkward, modernist market, surrounded by the standard array of shops, many of them closed in the early afternoon, when we visited.

Many of Rome's neighborhoods have a "favorite son"--always a young man rather than a woman, and usually a political figure from the Anni di Piombo (Years of Lead), a period in the 1970s and early 1980s characterized by deep political divisions and violence. The identity of the favorite son defines the political identity of the neighborhood.

Tufello's walls tell the story.  In posters and wall art, the quartiere remembers Valerio Verbano.  Verbano was born into an anti-fascist family in 1961, and became an active militant during his high school years in the Rome neighborhood of Nuovo Salario.  He was a Communist and a member of Autonomia Operaia ("Worker's Autonomy" - loosely translated - perhaps "Power to the Workers" might be better).  In April 1979, Verbano was arrested and charged with fabricating explosive devices--basically, Molotov cocktails--in an abandoned building in San Basilio.  He was convicted and served 6 months in prison.

These signs appear on a gymnasium building (palestra). 

"Valerio Verbano--Militant Communist, Assassinated by the Fascist Skunks
An Idea Never Dies"

On February 22, 1980--three days from his 19th birthday--Verbano was shot and killed by three armed and masked men who had come to his home at via Monte Bianco 114, tied up his parents,and waited for Valerio to come home from school. Though the case was investigated many times over the years, it has never been solved--which may explain Verbano's prominence on Tufello's walls 40 years later. The Monte Bianco address places Verbano's home just south of Viale Jonio.

While much of the area's wall art and postering deals with Verbano, a good portion is more broadly political, marking the neighborhood as anti-fascist, militant and, after almost 80 years, still linked to the anti-Fascist/anti-Nazi partisans (partigiani) of World War II.  This wall immediately below links Verbano and Carla to the partisans.

"ieri partigiani"--yesterday, partisans

Identifying the enemies: money and Nazis--and something else

"Antifa Tufello"--anti-Fascist Tufello
Again, red and black flags

Cuore is heart, ribelle is rebels or rebellious. Not sure what a good translation would be
other than a literal "Rebellious heart". 

And the poster below reveals that Valerio is more than an idea; every year, on the anniversary of his death, the community marches in his memory, and for what he presumably stood for and against: against the "racism of the state," against the "war on the poor," "connecting the resistance."  A significant level of distrust of government here. (Tufello was cited in one of Conor Fitzgerald's novels as a neighborhood "where the police have not disturbed the criminal status quo." 

"1980...The Revolt Goes On...2019"

Bill

I've written many posts on "heroes" celebrated on Rome's walls, from both the left and the right. Here are some of them:
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-story-of-zippo.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/09/piazza-vescovio-anni-di-piombo-and.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2011/12/gabbo-death-and-life-of-gabriele-sandri.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/10/sites-of-anti-fascism-trionfale.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-tale-of-two-suburbs-balduina.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2019/10/villa-certosa-hidden-rome-neighborhood.html

L'Aquila: A lesson in Italy's failure to rebuild after the 2009 earthquake.

Post-earthquake reconstruction?  Six years later, this is L'Aquila.

The most recent devastating earthquake in Italy hit in the Marche province on October 26, followed by aftershocks. An August 24 quake not far away killed almost 300 people. 

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is promising complete restoration.  We are - sadly - skeptical.  As a poignant piece of evidence, we give you L'Aquila, where a 2009 earthquake in this large, historic center in the Abruzzo region that neighbors Marche, resulted in 309 deaths.

We had been in L'Aquila many years ago.  This classic medieval city, capital of the Abruzzo province, is less than 75 miles from Rome, but 75 miles that can seem like centuries, and that took several days to cover in Margaret Fuller's time.  The city sits at the foot of the Gran Sasso mountains we intended to (and did) climb; they reach over 10,000 feet, the highest Italian mountains south of the Alps.

Last year, 6 years after the quake, we decided to see what had been accomplished after the earthquake.  We had heard of the slowness of the rebuilding, mafia involvement, scandals, and the like.  But nothing prepared us for the ghost town L'Aquila still was - 6 years later.  The photo above of one street is, unfortunately, typical of most of the streets of L'Aquila. Buildings shored up, at best, but unreconstructed and uninhabitable.

A closer view of the cracking produced by the 2009 earthquake.

Here one can see efforts to protect the older, classic building windows and doors.
Again, this is the best the 'reconstruction' seems to offer.

Businesses stopped in their tracks.  And not re-opened, of course.  This was a
unisex hair salon.

We'll get back to the destruction.  But we must take a couple sentences to describe the highly unusual setting in which - without planning on our part - we found L'Aquila in May 2015: it was the annual national 3-day "raduno" or "adunata" - a gathering of the Italian Army's Alpini units - gatherings that attract several hundred thousand men and a few women.  And this year, in an attempt to bring life and attention to the devastated city, they were meeting in L'Aquila, even though there were only a handful of rooms available to them in the city itself.  Many took 1-2 hour long train rides into L'Aquila daily; others set up tents and slept in vans. 

The Alpini were formed as a northern mountain unit of the Italian army.  One finds Alpini almost everywhere in Italy these days.  They still are a significant branch of the army.  And, since my family is from the north (15 km south of the Swiss border), all the men belonged to the Alpini (see a photo of my great-grandfather below).  The Alpini would recognize L'Aquila, and its location in the Gran Sasso, as part of the mountain regions that Alpini love.

Our first shot of the Alpini, recognizable by a black feather in their caps
(officers get a white feather) was of them being tourists.  Here they are at L'Aquila's
famed 13th century "Fountain of the 99 Spouts" (Fontana delle 99 Cannelle)

The poster for the 2015 Adunata.  Note the emphasis on the mountains and the black feathers.

Here's how the Alpini managed their gathering in L'Aquila - they brought in their own pop-up restaurants and beer tents;
this one set up right next to the scaffolded building.

The Alpini gathered in St. Peter's Square at their 1929 adunata.
One of the empty L'Aquila buildings had a small exhibit of prior Alpini "adunate,"
which is where we found this, among many other photos and artifacts.

The Alpini here were singing a traditional song.  To the left is the hotel in
 which we stayed many years ago.  This is in a newer part of the city, 
where there was less devastation because of better building practices.
  The Gran Sasso can be seen in back.

Back to the destruction.  

The sign scrawled on this wall says "L'Aquila  will be arise (be reborn) from the Mafia."

It's not clear these buildings will be rebuilt.

The blocked-off streets are in the "red zone," where one cannot even walk.

This banner in the main square says:
"One finds a red zone everywhere and the issue is a national one."

Outside an obviously newer but poorly built "Students' House," photos
of some of the more than 100 "angels" who died there in the earthquake.
 Arrests followed the collapse of the building.

Housing built for displaced residents - but not near any work.  From the train,
we saw these on the outskirts of Paganica, about 15 km from L'Aquila.  

A view of L'Aquila from a distance.  The cranes are there, but where are the workers and the work?  Snow-capped (in May)
Gran Sasso in the distance.

Elizabeth Povoledo wrote about L'Aquila in the New York Times a few weeks ago. Remarkably, her photos don't look any different from ours of 2015.

There were a few signs of hope.

A bar on the central square, run by the Fratelli Nuria, was open. It was
 not simply an Alpini pop-up. Signs announced it as the first business
 to reopen after the quake. The family also made its own, excellent torrone  
(which we bought and ate). You can see a couple Alpini among the patrons.

This surprising restored house, with a woman watering her plants, was the lone
exception we saw.

Our hotel receptionist rode with us on the train from L'Aquila to Paganica where many people were housed (photo above).  She told us that 6 years later her house was not habitable but that she had to continue paying her mortgage, and continue living in Paganica, about 15 km away.   We wrote last December about a church, built into rock, in Paganica.

And below is Giovanni Mambretti, my Italian grandmother's father, standing at left, with his Alpini.

We hope to visit L'Aquila again, and that we will see significant progress the next time.  Should you wish to visit L'Aquila, our hotel was ideal.  It was in a newer building, below the city (you do have to walk up and down hills a lot in L'Aquila), and in 2015 it was fully open, including the excellent restaurant serving Abruzzi specialties.  It's the Hotel "99 Cannelle", because it's across the street from that famous fountain.

Dianne

Rome: Italy's Capital...of Evictions

Pigneto mural.  The flag says "STOP Sfratti"

"Rome is Italy's capital of evictions," announces professor of Urban Studies Pierpaolo Mudu in a recent essay on housing.  According to Mudu, about 6700 eviction orders were issued in 2011, and since 1983 actual evictions have average 2850 every year.  About 60% of evictions occur because tenants can't or wouldn't pay the rent, most of the rest because a rental contract had expired.

The Italian word for evictions is "sfratti."

Ar bottom: "Together we block evictions."  

The odd thing about evictions is one seldom sees them happening.  No heap of furniture outside, no
tearful tenants being dragged from their doorways. That's because today, most evictions take place on Rome's periphery, where the city's working class and poor reside, rather than in the tourist-heavy Centro.













That wasn't always the case.  In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of ordinary Romans were evicted from their center-city homes and apartments to make way for the broad avenues and vehicles favored by the Fascist regime.  They were moved to borgate (villages, hamlets), including Acilia, built from scratch in 1923, about 15 km outside the city.  Later, those evicted--both from legal and illegal housing (borgetti) were moved to Magliana (built at the end of the 1960s), and to public housing built at Laurentino 38, Tor Bella Monaca, and Corviale.

Typical post-war public housing.  Centocelle area.  

For much of the early twentieth century, Rome governments, whether Fascist or democratic, built  a lot of public housing.  Some of it, as in close-in Garbatella, was well-designed and produced workable communities. And some of it--Corviale is a famous example--was poorly designed, alienating from the start.

Beginning in about 1980 (coinciding with Reagan's election in the United States), city governments showed little interest in public housing, even as housing absorbed a larger and larger percentage of household income, and evictions continued apace.

Squatters in EUR, c. 1940

Thousands of  people found accommodations as squatters, living in unoccupied quarters in housing projects, or in shanty towns without public services.  In the 1970s there were forced relocations from Valle Aurelia, Mandrione, Prenestino and Casilino to "dormitories" in Corviale, Laurentino 38, and Spinaceto.

Idroscalo, once again threatened with demolition.

Today there is apparently only one borgetto (an illegally constructed neighborhood) left in Rome: Idroscalo, on the coast. About 100 of the homes in Idroscalo were bulldozed in 2011, and it seems clear that the authorities would like to level the remaining buildings to make way for a large marina, a resort hotel, and other amenities they think will attract tourists with money.

Vicolo Savini, after evictions of Rom (Roma) in 2011

It's tempting to blame the evictions on insensitive right-wing mayors, like Gianni Alemanno, and indeed he was responsible for the 2011 evictions from 4 unauthorized encampments, in Tiburtina and vicolo Savini (across the river from the Marconi neighborhood), most of whose residents were Roma (sometimes called "Rom," sometimes "gypsies").  But the center-left hasn't been much better.  In 2005, Walter Veltroni (who wrote an introduction to our first book, Rome the Second Time) authorized the eviction of hundreds of Senegalese and Italians from Residence Roma, a building near Forte Bravetta on Rome's north end.

Communist Party poster opposing
evictions.  Posted by a Quadraro committee,
but this one was in Torpignattara.  

Resistance to evictions, and more generally to inadequate housing, was in the post-war years led by the Communist Party, which sought to help residents of the borgate by working to legalize illegal housing.  Although not the force it was years ago, the party remains active in opposing evictions.

Graffiti in San Basilio, commemorating the 30th anniversary
 of the 1974 deadly clash with police over evictions
 (reading "San Basilio: Same Dignity, Same Anger, 1974-2014")

After 1970, the main form of resistance was squatting--that is, the illegal occupation of empty apartments and buildings, including public housing projects--along with demands for lower rents.  At one protest in San Basilio in September 1974, a young left-wing activist was killed in a clash with police.

Today, some of San Basilio's "projects" are decorated with handsome multi-story murals, including a group of 6 by Hitnes.  Even so, if the posters and graffiti in San Basilio and similar neighborhoods are any indication, evictions continue, and with them, new efforts at resistance.

Bill

"Rent is Robbery. Occupy"     Pigneto.  

Idroscalo: An unauthorized, self-built Rome community

It's not often we're "scooped" by La Repubblica, but that was the feeling I had this morning (May 24, 2015) when I opened the paper to find an entire page devoted to Idroscalo, a community of some 500 homes and 2,000 people located north of the seaside town of Ostia, about 20 miles from Rome, on a spit of land between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the mouth of the Tiber River (the part known to residents as the Fiumara Grande).  The occasion for La Repubblica's interest is a May 26 technical "tavolo"--a bunch of experts getting together--"finalmente," as the newspaper put it, to deal with the case of Idroscalo.  Don't hold your breath.

RST was in Idroscalo about 10 days ago.  This was our second, and more informed visit.  The first time we were seeking the place where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in 1975.  We came upon Idroscalo and felt we had hit a dead end.  This time, we had read Ferruccio Trabalzi's superb essay on the community in the collection Global Rome--we'll draw on it extensively here--and couldn't resist seeing the place with our own eyes.  Still, we had concerns.  Idroscalo is an unauthorized, illegal, and self-built community --according to Trabalzi, the "last surviving self-built small borghetto (illegally constructed neighborhood)" in all of Rome.  Its residents are poor and rightfully suspicious of strangers, especially those taking photographs, for those strangers are more likely than not to be the advance

In early 2011, there were 100 houses on this part of Idroscalo.  The
masts of the 2000 ships in the upscale marina are in the distance.

guard of yet another effort at eviction and demolition.

The last such event took place on March 8, 2011, when residents awoke to the presence of some 200 riot police and 4 bulldozers, which then proceeded to demolish about 100 homes along the seashore.  The area is subject to frequent flooding from the sea and, especially, the Tevere, and it's likely that the action was "justified" by the authorities as a measure necessary to the safety of the inhabitants. Protests by Idroscalo residents halted the demolitions.



Trabalzi describes Idroscalo as a

The main "square".  The town's coffee bar, complete with
umbrellas.  Bus service at right.  

 "social and cultural desert", save for a small chapel:  "no shops, no community center, no library, no piazza, no gardens or city offices, let alone any pharmacies or doctors."  That's mostly true.  But the entrance to the town has the feel of a piazza (there is turnaround bus service there - the head - or end - of the line), albeit one without amenities such as a fountain, benches, or trees.

Functioning restaurant, behind the bar

There's a restaurant just off the piazza--of the
sort middle-class Romans frequent on Sunday afternoons--and one of the town's two bars is on the piazza.  On the occasion of our mid-morning visit, the bar was functioning, as Rome bars do, as an informal social center, men sitting at tables and teen-age girls and boys in bathing suits circling on bicycles.

Our first act was to have a coffee at that bar. Rather than walking through the piazza, we wanted to announce ourselves, in something of an act of reassurance - for them, but also for us. We hoped they'd get the message: that we were Americans, that we weren't from the government, that whatever photos we took weren't going to hurt them, that we were self-confidently engaged in our own activity.  Still, we were never entirely comfortable while in the town.  The coffee was served in glass cups.



For most of an hour we walked the town, up one "street" and down another, along the area near the sea where the bulldozers of 2011 had left the land barren.  One man looked suspiciously at us as we walked by his home, yet said nothing.

Dogs, visible, center left, lying down, would make
us turn back a few yards later.

In the very center of the community--not a person in sight--we were forced to retreat by 3 barking dogs that ran at us--and then stopped as we turned. To avoid being too obvious, many of the photographs were taken at waist level or from long distance.

Squalor, one could say, with satellite TV

La Repubblica's story for the most part depicts the residents of Idroscalo as victims.  In the words of the headline:  "Favelas Idroscalo/vita da miserabili/nelle case di calce/senz'acqua né luce" (Idroscalo ghetto/living miserable lives in houses of lime, without water or electric light).  As even the newspaper recognizes, that's a bit overstated.  Yes, the roads are of packed earth, there is no "proper" sewage system (Trabalzi), most of the houses would reasonably be described as substandard, and--on the grounds that the community is illegal--there is no garbage collection within the town, though bins are not far away on the road leading to Ostia, whose middle class and upscale apartment buildings are only a few kilometers away.  As for water, over the years residents have developed an informal system that collects water from three
drinking fountains, deposits it in tanks, and uses pumps driven by electricity to move the water to rooftops and distribute it from there to residents.  And, obviously, there is electricity.  Most residents are on the regular ACEA (the water and power company) city grid.  Before 1977, hookups with ACEA were the norm, but laws passed then eliminated the arrangement, and homes built after 1977 are off the grid. According to La Repubblica, Idroscalo collectively owes ACEA 71,000 Euro. Cooking is by gas cylinders (we noticed some large ones).  Each year households are fined 2000 Euro for illegally occupying the public domain.

More middle class.

If life is so bad in Idroscalo, why doesn't everyone leave?  That's Trabalzi's question, and it's a good one.  One answer is that over the years--and some have lived there decades--residents have invested most of what they have in their homes, such as they are.  Another is that they rightly fear that the government's promises of relocation to better housing isn't a dependable one, raising the specter of homelessness and, if it were, that they'd find themselves in some version of the infamous Corviale, a kilometer-long concrete block 1970s-era disaster.  In addition, it seems clear that many Idroscalians enjoy living there.  "All the residents," Trabalzi claims, "agree on one point...that they live in a beautiful place" of gorgeous sunsets, with populations of dolphins and white herons, swans and swallows--and the smell of the sea.

Not so affluent.  

The Idroscalo that exists today had its origins in the early 1960s, when fishermen from Rome neighborhoods built small, and of course illegal, huts to use in the summer and the occasional weekend.  When it became clear that the authorities tolerated the huts, they were expanded and made more permanent. Idroscalo became a year-round community in the 1970s, largely out of necessity, when a city-wide crisis of affordable, legal housing led thousands of poor Romans to take up illegal, self-made residence along via  Casilina, via Boccea, via Prenestina, Mandrione--and Idroscalo. According to Trabalzi, authorities have here and there pursued a policy of "benign neglect" in places like Idroscalo, in part because the elimination of illegal communities would require the construction of low-income housing.

But that policy--a combination of fines, raids, threats, neglect and tolerance of self-made, illegal communities--may be coming to an end.  Residents of similar communities in Valle Aurelia, Casilino, Mandrione and elsewhere have experienced relocation to high-rise housing in places like Laurentino 38.  In 2000, private investors received permission to build a 300-boat marina within a

Behind the red timbers is a second bar, serving sandwiches, gelato, and more.  The marina is back right.  

hundred meters of Idroscalo's "piazza," promising employment to Idroscalo residents (it didn't happen); the marina was expanded in 2008.  But for the protests, all of Idroscalo might have been bulldozed in 2011.  According to Trabalzi, there is talk of turning the area into a "nature park" and, more threatening still, Idroscalo has attracted interest from corporations and politicians as a possible new center of tourism, complete with elaborate hotels and other amenities to complement the marina.
That may be what Tuesday's "tavolo" is all about.  

Bill

This photo closely resembles La Repubblica's  "lead" picture, pink chairs and all.  Several efforts at comfort here:
the umbrella, a bench, chairs, flowers, a rock garden--and a madonella.