The Parking Garage beneath the Villa Borghese

It was a lovely afternoon on via Veneto, and so we naturally decided to explore--hope you're ready for this--an underground parking garage!  (Chorus of moans, sighs of despair from readers. Tearing of hair.)

In our defense, we think this is only the second parking garage we've featured.  The other is Riccardo Morandi's groovy (as in late 1950s) structure, linked to a large indoor market on via Magnagrecia.  Not everyone--not even some well known Rome architects--knows about that building. 

Adventure begins

The garage we explore in this post is located on (or under) viale del Galoppatoio, beneath the Villa Borghese.  It can be accessed off the fast-moving viale del Muro Torto.  Indeed, there's a YouTube video of a driver coming up the Muro Torto, turning onto the garage access ramp, going through the garage, and exiting--well, somewhere.  It's less than two minutes long:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJHuorfImZU. 


We took the pedestrian escalator entrance at the high end of via

Veneto.  Once below ground level, to get to the garage proper one walks through a long tunnel that is sometimes peopleless. 












At the end of the tunnel there's a depressing commercial area (not fully occupied, not enough

Too much concrete.  But then it's a parking garage.

"traffic").  Beyond that there's some brutalist concrete work (right) and--the first sign, really, of the architectural genius we're looking for--a circular staircase that leads upward to the park (below). 











It's a bit worn now, but still impressive.  Maybe the architect knew of Morandi's circular design (of

You could date the structure within 10 years just from
this stairway

course he did).  It's not Borromini's staircase in the Palazzo Barberini.  It's not Albini and Helg's department store gem in Piazza Fiume.  But it is suggestive. 

Watergate apartments, Washington, D.C.

It ought to be.  For the architect who designed the stairway, and the famous garage beneath, is one of Rome's most famous and most talented.  Readers of Rome the Second Time will know him as the author of the recently restored ex-GIL in Trastevere, but he is also revered for the Casa della Cooperative Astra (1947-51) on via Jenner, and for a building known as La Girasole (1949-50), on via Bruno Buozzi, at no. 64.  He had a hand, too, in the 1960 Olympic Village in the Flaminio district.  Most Americans will be familiar with his Washington, D.C. creation: the Watergate complex. 

Under construction.  It's better without cars. 

The garage is by Luigi Moretti.  It houses 1800 spaces for automobiles, 210 for scooters and motorcycles.  It was completed between 1965 and 1972, which accounts for the hybrid look of late modernism and early brutalism (the concrete noted earlier). Whatever its appeal, it was sufficient to lure a major international modern art exhibit--known as Contemporanea--which inhabited the structure in 1973, a moment when such an idea could not only be imagined, but brought to fruition.  The garage's architectural reputation would seem to rest (like the garage itself) on its graceful, space-age columns, and on its concave roof treatments, with a nod to the occasional provision for natural light.  

Contemporanea, 1973, an area featuring Kounellis

Now, isn't that more fun that having a cocktail at the Grand Hotel Palace?

Bill

p.s. A controversial plan, involving some actual digging, to add some 700 area parking places in a nearby lot under the Pincio, the small hill above Piazza del Popolo--said to be necessary to convert the trident area off the piazza to pedestrian-only traffic--now seems dead. 


 

Light from above enters the space.  Even some foliage. 

Underground Parking: Rome's latest Panacea

Rome is in the midst of an underground parking boom. In many neighborhoods--all outside the center, where antiquities are less likely to be encountered during the dig--underground parking lots either have been built, are being built, or are in the planning stage. The authorities have generally chosen two kinds of places to build the underground facilities: properties with no buildings on them (usually small parks), and wide, multi-lane parkways with trees in the middle, where traffic can run in reduced fashion during construction. One parkway project is underway near the Park of the Aqueducts, off the Lucio Sestio subway stop on via Lucio Sestio. Another, in the neighborhood of San Paolo, is underconstruction along viale Leonardo da Vinci. Lots under parks or vacant lots have been built in Flaminio at Piazza Melozzo da Fiori, and in Tor Pignattara.

The reason for all this activity is obvious: there are too many cars in Rome, even in outlying zones, and parking is obscenely difficult. If you're out late in the evening in your car, you are guaranteed a 10-minute search for a (probably illegal) posto (parking place). Although scooters often park on the sidewalk, that is not the custom in every neighborhood or on every street, and the city's ongoing efforts to delineate legal scooter parking places using white lines have in some places had the effect of limiting choice. So why not ease the parking problem by building lots underground?

We're not civil engineers or urban planners, but we've seen some of the existing facilities and observed enough of the ongoing protests against those planned or under construction, to understand why the underground lots might not be a good idea. The Flaminio lot was completed several years ago and finished with a public piazza above it. But the lot isn't operating, perhaps because of safety concerns, and the ramp leading to it is covered with graffiti (and not the artistic kind). Moreover, the piazza was poorly designed--mostly stone slabs, with a few benches--and is today lightly used, especially given the area's population density. We saw the surface portions of two lots in Tor Pignattara, and neither makes us optimistic. One was covered by a small, elevated park with two-foot weeds (photo at right)--asking for trouble. The other was still an ugly field, awaiting landscaping.

We're most familiar with the viale Leonardo da Vinci project, which we passed several times a day, and with the protests against it that began while we were living nearby.
There in San Paolo, elements of the community have organized to stop the project, distributing flyers (at left), holding community meetings, putting up signs, and contacting local and national leaders and other organizations that might have an interest in keeping the underground lot out of the neigborhood. Interestingly, one of the signs (see top of this post) blames not only the current Rome mayor, Gianni Alemanno, but the former mayor, Walter Veltroni (who authored the Foreword to Rome the Second Time): Veltroni & Alemanno/'sto parcheggio/fa solo DANNO! (this parking lot does only damage).

The protesters have several concerns. One is for the safety of children who attend school at the "Principe di Piemonte" facility, located across the viale from the area's apartment buildings; they argue that the new traffic configuration, by eliminating the parkway strip at the center, will result in an unsafe crossing. Another, emphasized in one of the flyers, is that the project will destabilize nearby buildings (the area is unusual geologically).

A third concern, which dominates the hand-printed signs on fences along the viale, is environmental, centered on the destruction of the mature trees that line the sides of the viale and its center strip. One says "Alberi condannati/a morte/dal parcheggio" (trees condemned to death by the parking lot). Another (right) says, "vi do/ossigeno/ma mi/abbattono/x un posto/auto!" (I give you oxygen, but you take me down, [in exchange for?] a parking space!"

Finally, the protesters make the surprising but telling point that the lot won't really help make parking easier: only 80 new, expensive ("a caro prezzo"), underground spaces, less than the number of cars that could park on the viale.
One of the signs (left) picks up on the class aspect of the project, calling the parking lot a place for the "pochi privilegiati" (the privileged few).

We sense that the protests are too little, too late, especially when it comes stopping projects already under construction; that won't happen. But we share the concerns of the opponents of underground parking and wish them success. As long as we don't have a car.

Bill