Rome Posters: Lines of Excess

A mobile poster, in Piazza dei Rei di Roma.

Rome is the poster child for....posters!  They're in every neighborhood, often long lines of them, often long lines of the same poster, usually framed in iron racks that line the sidewalks, holes having been driven in the asphalt.  At the height of political campaigns, huge posters are driven around the city on trucks.  Most of the posters are political in one way or another, featuring a candidate, a party, and/or a position on some crucial issue of the day, such as immigration, waste disposal, or Italy's relationship with the European Union. 

The poster at top is for a party on the right (destra); it calls for the "immediate expulsion of undocumented immigrants," as well as for the re-election of the right-wing Mayor, Gianni Alemanno (he lost). 

Poster line along a Metro construction site.

We enjoy reading the posters and gathering from them information about the city's elections, politicians, and shared concerns.  That much is good.  What isn't good is that the poster lines are too often a blight on the urban landscape.  They're tolerable when the landscape is itself a mess, so that a poster line placed on an already disruptive Metro construction site doesn't make much difference. 








But this sort of modest restraint, if one could call if that, is seldom practiced.  One line in Prati runs down the middle of what would otherwise be an elegant, treed median/parkway. 

Those that cleave to the sidewalks leave little room for pedestrians and bring clutter--and often refuse--to nice residential areas (see the poster at end). 

Messy.  And badly positioned between a park and a church.

This line borders a park in the Marconi area and is directly across the street from Santo Volto, a lovely and important new church designed by Rome architects Piero Sartogo and Nathalie Grenon. 

Blocking the view of Acqua Paola (visible at upper left) and
the city below

And now and then, a poster line is placed especially ineptly.  On one side of this line (in back of the photographer) is a comely park on the Gianicolo.  On the other side (if the poster line were miraculously removed, it would be right in front  of you) is one of Rome's treasures: the enormous, elaborate fountain known as Acqua Paola (no. 19 on RST's Top 40). 

Bill

Neighborhood blight, this time in San Giovanni

Mapping Rome

We love maps, and we detest GPS systems--at least when used in Rome. Maps help one understand a city, deep down; GPS gets you from point A to point B, but its micro-focus guarantees that you won't know much about how the city is laid out and functions.

We recently bought the map shown here. It's a copy, printed in Rome in 2004. The title is Rome Presente e Avvenire (Rome Present and Future). It's not a Rome-the-Second-Time map; we've lived in seven Rome neighborhoods, and only one of them--just to the east of via della Lungara--is on the map.

And that's what makes it fascinating. On the southwest side of town, the Marconi area where we spent one pleasant (except for the filthy streets) spring, doesn't yet exist. To the southeast, development pretty much ends at San Giovanni in Laterano, at least a mile from our apartment a few blocks from Piazza Re di Roma. Northeast, there isn't much development beyond viale della Regina Margherita; the Piazza Bologna area, the site of two itineraries in Rome the Second Time and one of our favorite places, doesn't yet exist. And to the northwest, there isn't much of anything beyond the walls of the Vatican. Inside the city, the map shows something called Aqua Mariana flowing from Parco della Caffarella through Circo Massimo, and today's village-like neighborhood of San Saba is mostly farmland. The black areas on the map are demolitions.

So, what's a good date for the map? We welcome your help in figuring out just what it is we bought!

Bill