Campo Testaccio: AS Roma's Historic Field

Today, it's entirely overgrown, a swath of land in the heart of the city, abandoned to nature and inhabited by the homeless.  You can peer in from via Nicola Zabaglia, just a half block from the entrance to Monte Testaccio, at via Zabaglia and via Galvani, and just across the street from some of Testaccio's best-known bars and restaurants.  You're just five minutes from the Pyramid.  See the historical aerial views at the bottom of this post.

The site was--and still is--known to Romans as Campo Testaccio (Testaccio Field).  For 11 years, from 1929, when it was constructed, until 1940, Campo Testaccio was the home field of the legendary Rome soccer club, AS Roma, founded in 1926.  The stadium held 20,000 fans, and they reveled in the team's success in those years--103 wins, 32 ties, 26 losses. 

Campo Testaccio, c. 1935

Though the team won no championships while playing on that field, the stadium was immortalized in "Campo Testaccio," an anthem written by Toto Castellucci and sung by generations of Roma fans.  Click on the 'play' buttons in this link for traditional and modern versions of the song:





http://www.campotestaccio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=71&Itemid=55.

What happened to the field in the 60 years after the team moved to Stadio Nazionale is unclear, though at the turn of this century, when we first saw it, the campo still resembled a place where one could play soccer. 

But in 2008 preparations began for an underground parking lot on the site, and in came the bulldozers.

Bulldozers on their way

Apparently the area proved inhospitable for that purpose, and a grass-roots movement, peopled by Roma fans, took root--a "save the stadium" effort.  Surprisingly, just this year it met with some success; the city council removed the campo from the city's parking program and returned it to a sporting-use designation.  Maybe it'll look different the next time we see it.

Once you've seen the forlorn remains of Campo Testaccio, direct your attention to the area just west of the field, still along via Zabaglia.  Stop in front of what looks like another of the city's many Madonelle--street corner Madonnas.  In this case, we're not looking at the classic Mary.  The "madonna" being worshiped here is, appropriately, the Signora der Futtebball!    

Nostra Signora der Futtebball

         Campo Testaccio Incoronò (Crowned by Campo Testaccio)          

or

Testaccio Crowned Mother Mary Queen of Roma Football

     

Left: field center, via Marmorata Post Office upper right, Protestant cemetery lower right, Monte Testaccio lower left.    Right: 1932, from a different angle.  

 Bill

A Secret Street in Rome--bet you've never been there!

There aren't too many secret streets in Rome--those off-off-off-the beaten path streets that even the locals may not know.  We've found one, and none too soon, for it's about to disappear, or at the least take on a very different look.  As it turns out, some interesting folks--including a number of prominent artists--live on the street (more below).  But the reason we know about it is because some of the buildings are illegal. 

We're talking about via Paolo Caselli, some 200 yards of homes and businesses that could be said to connect the neighborhood of Ostiense with that of Testaccio.  One end of the street begins precisely across the street from the entrance to the non-Catholic cemetery, which backs up onto the Pyramid. One can drive in this way.  The other end, accessible on foot only, can be found at the end of a small parking lot, directly across the street from the 1930s-era post office on via Marmorata.

via Paolo Caselli, non-Catholic cemetery end

Around the bend

Although we had been to the non-Catholic cemetery many times, we had never "seen" this street--until, that is, it appeared in the newspapers--and not because it was a quaint, unrecognized tourist attraction, which it is not, except maybe for RST.  As reported in La Repubblica, via Paolo Caselli is a poster child for abusivismo--literally, abusiveness, but in this case illegally constructed buildings, those lacking proper construction permits and other authorizations--and probably not paying taxes.

Certainly has the look of a legit business

Indeed, the story as reported is more interesting than that.  At via Paolo Caselli #1 (the first building on the left as you enter from the cemetery side), not only has one of the units been illegally occupied for more than ten years, but the brother of the occupier heads the police unit charged with keeping

A series of buildings at #1

track of the ownership of Rome buildings.  Sounds  bad!  Moreover, it looks like the family has been profiting from illegal building for more than 50 years, dating back decades to when the father of the two brothers distributed mineral water from a warehouse on the street.

A business behind the gate--not sure what.

And there's another angle here that we found fascinating.  There are many other "abusivo" properties on the street, and most of them are occupied not by Mafia types or low-lifes or anything of the sort, but--guess what?--by artists!  Some or most or all of them will be "sgomberati" (evicted), and the buildings they occupy torn down, costs borne by the occupiers (we'll believe that when we see it). Several are sculptors, at least one a woman, an ancestor, so explains La Repubblica, of Naples gypsies. Another is Paolo Olmeda, owner of an historic foundry--apparently located on this street--in which Olmeda in 2006 made bronze reproductions of Amodeo Modigliani's 1910 Tête di Cartiatide. Then there's the German artist, Janine von Thungen, who made molds of the walls of the catacombs of San Callisto and created the work "Eternity," for a time in the Villa Foscari in Venice.

von Thungen's "Eternity"  

Besides these notable artists, it seems the local station of the fire department is also responsible for its own "abusivo" structure, an add-on building at the Marmorata end of the street.

Perhaps only the bocce ball facility is legal.  Who knows?

Bill

The Vision on Largo Ascianghi: an Inquiry

We happened upon this large and intriguing paste-up one evening while walking in Largo Ascianghi, opposite Nanni Moretti's cinema, near Porta Portese.  The building in the background of the paste-up, well known to followers of Rome's modern architecture, closely resembles one of four modernist post offices built by Mussolini's regime in the 1930s.  This one is located on via Marmorata, not far from the Pyramid, and it's still used, as are the others, as a post office.  The building haunts the scene in a way reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico's urban 'scapes.  The mural is by RomaBolognaCooperazione, or RoBoCoop.   

The via Marmorata Post Office, Life Magazine, 1940

Curiously, though, the figures in the foreground ride horses rather than drive cars, and they're engaged in tasks that could be described as pre-industrial, including sawing logs with a 2-man hand saw.  At center, four people carry what might be a coffin.  At left, goods are moved by a primitive cart, with thick and possibly wooden wheels, drawn by an ox.  In front/center, the capital from an ancient column suggests that the glories of that period--and, indeed, any interest in it--are in the past.  In the right foreground, a woman rides behind a man on horseback, one dressed in an animal skin tunic of the sort normally identified with cave men.  The number of people in the scene suggest a community, engaged in construction, or reconstruction.

As it turns out, the Ascianghi mural is a redoing of a late-15th-century work (picture below) by Piero di Cosimo, known as an "eccentric" artist.  The workers in the foreground--the same in both works--are engaged in constructing the building in the background. 

What might RoBoCoop have had in mind?  On the one hand, the artist(s) could be suggesting that as much as everything changes, everything stays the same.  Yes, the nature of work changes, but construction goes on, and with some resemblance in the buildings, even though they are some 450 years apart.  Or the RoBoCoop piece could be a comment on the apocalypse, on a post-nuclear world in which humanity has lost all but its most basic skills, a world marked in time by the survival of at least one 20th-century building, a remnant of a pre-nuclear world.

We welcome members' thoughts and ideas.

Bill
PS - We realized only later that we met a couple of the RoBoCoop artists during the Open House Roma weekend - another plus for that spectacular event.
And thanks to Jess Stewart for helping us figure out the artists here.

Sites of Anti-Fascism: Trionfale, Garbatella, and San Lorenzo

Post Office on Via Marmorata, 1940 photo

Regular readers of these pages are familiar with the remaining reminders of the Fascist era in Rome, of which the Foro Mussolini/Foro Italico, the grand complex of EUR, Luigi Moretti’s House of the Italian Fascist Youth (l'ex GIL in Trastevere), the Ostiense Post Office on Via Marmorata, the University of Rome, the Via dell’Impero, and what was once the Ministry of Corporations (improbably on Via Veneto) are only the most prominent (see links at end). 

Public Housing in Trionfale

Less well known are the sites of resistance to Fascism.  They were all, at the time, areas of the city populated by and identified with the city’s working class, students, and youth.  Two—the near-in “suburbs” of Trionfale and Garbatella—were the sites of major public housing developments built or completed under Fascist auspices.  

Garbatella is one of the itineraries in our new book, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler; see below for more information.

One of Mario Mafai's "demolition" paintings, late 1930s

Significantly, these “projects” (to use the American term) housed many families that had been driven from the central city when their living quarters were razed to make way for the broad avenues favored by Mussolini and other Fascists.  Artist Mario Mafai, whose own family was forced from the Monti quarter by the demolitions (in Italian, sventramento/tearing down), did a series of paintings on the subject. 

The Red Hotel, Garbatella

In Garbatella, four of the largest buildings, including the famous and still-standing Albergo bianco (white hotel) and Albergo rosso (Red hotel) now and then served as detention centers for communists and others deemed dangerous to the state.  When Hitler made his one and only visit to Rome in 1938, potential dissidents were rounded up and brought to the “hotels,” where they were placed under police guard.  The hotels also housed ex-prisoners returning to Rome after incarceration elsewhere.  In addition, living conditions in the hotels contributed to anti-fascism.   Residents not only resented being forced out of their former neighborhoods, but also disliked having to leave their own furniture behind for the iron tables and chairs provided by the complexes. 

Anti-fascist graffiti on Garbatella's old marketplace,
2009 (now being renovated)

Moreover, the great majority of the men living in the new housing in Garbatella were proletarians--ordinary, poorly paid workers struggling to keep their jobs and feed their families under the difficult conditions of the worldwide Great Depression.  These workers were especially vocal, and most likely to incur the wrath and intervention of the police, as May 1—Europe’s labor day—approached.   In 1943, with Fascism disintegrating  and the city occupied by the Nazis,  some 270 of the most disaffected—from the working-class neighborhoods of Ostiense, Testaccio and San Saba, as well as Garbatella--formed a resistance organization with like-minded anti-fascists.  Even today Garbatella is known as Rome's most socially progressive neighborhood. 

San Lorenzo

But it was another working-class quartiere, this one to the north of the Centro, and close in, that caused the Fascists the most trouble.  San Lorenzo was a dense neighborhood of narrow streets, just the sort of place that the Fascists imagined was full of left-wing troublemakers.  In this case they were right.   In 1921, the year before the March on Rome, the Fascist Party congress came to the city, and some 30,000 blackshirts roamed the working-class sections of the city, bashing heads—especially in San Lorenzo—in what proved a deadly effort to keep dissidents in line. 

The following year, according to historian Paul Baxa, the arrival in the city of the remains of Enrico Toti, a hero of the Great War, killed on the Carso and a Fascist icon, brought another confrontation in San Lorenzo.  As the procession with Toti’s body moved along Via Tiburtina, through the heart of the district to the nearby Verano cemetery, anti-Fascists fired from windows and alleys.  Five months later, in the epic March on Rome, a unit of Fascisti, heading west and south on Via Tiburtina and warned to stay out of San Lorenzo, entered the area anyway and again faced fire from San Lorenzo’s socialists, communists, and anarchists.   

The center of the University of Rome, built,
so the story goes, on the ruins of San Lorenzo. The
sign in the foreground advertises the Rome version
of the "Occupy" movement (October 2011)

After the second of these events, an angry Mussolini announced in the newspaper Il Popolo that “all obstacles [to Fascism] will eventually come down.”  Not even Mussolini could tear down all of San Lorenzo, but he came close, or so the story goes.  In the 1930s the regime tore down most of San Lorenzo that lay to the northwest of Via Tiburtina for its new University.   Although Mussolini was capable of such venality, we’re just a bit skeptical, if only because our early-20^th century map of the area destined to house the university shows it to be nearly empty of buildings. 

Another site, not visual but oral, is the resistance anthem, Bella Ciao.

Bill
Links to other posts include Foro Mussolini/Foro Italico, Case Popolare (on Fascism's housing projects), L'ex GIL (the Moretti youth center), the via Marmorata post office, and the University of Rome (Gio' Ponti's mathematics building). Via Veneto's Fascist corporate buildings are on Itinerary 5 in RST:  The Nazis and Fascists in Central Rome.

And for more on Garbatella and Fascist architecture in Rome, see our new print AND eBook,  Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.  Along with the tour of Garbatella that includes the Red Hotel and the old marketplae, Modern Rome features three other walks: the 20th-century suburb of EUR, designed by the Fascists; the 21st-century music and art center of Flaminio, along with Mussolini's Foro Italico, also the site of the 1960 summer Olympics; and a stairways walk in classic Trastevere. 

This 4-walk book is available in all print and eBook formats The eBook is $1.99 through amazon.com and all other eBook sellers.  See the various formats at smashwords.com. 

Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler now is also available in print, at amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, independent bookstores,  and other retailers; retail price $5.99.

RST Top 40. #34: a Fascist Era Post Office

Two of Rome's masterpieces of architectural geometry are located within a stone's throw, across the street from each other in via Marmorata, at the intersection of the Aventino and Testaccio districts. One is the ancient Piramide Cestia (the Cestia Piramid). The other is the neighborhood post office, a modernist gem designed by architects Adalberto Libera and Mario De Renzi and opened to acclaim in 1935, with Mussolini presiding (see photo above). Architectural scholars Mirella Duca and Filippo Muraia describe the building's elegant interior as "one of the most original spaces constructed in Rome in the 1930s." The via Marmorata post office is on Itinerary 4 in Rome the Second Time.

Libera was only 30 years old when he began working on the project, though he was already well known as a founder of the Movimento Italiano per L'Architettura Razionale (Italian Movement for Rationalist Architecture) and feted for his facade for the monumental Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (photo at right), which opened in 1932 in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, also a collaborative effort with De Renzi.

Though apparently not a zealous Fascist, Libera's close links with Fascist Party officials allowed him to compete for the regime's choice commissions, including the Palazzo dei Congressi, which he designed for the EUR complex. One of Libera's last works, accomplished with several other architects, was the Olympic Village (see photo at right), which housed athletes competing in the 1960 Rome games (including boxer Cassius Clay, who was seen taking photos of the complex). It is located in the Flaminio district, not far from Parco della Musica.

De Renzi's first commission, for the enormous 1931 Palazzo Federici apartment complex on via Aprile XXI, near Piazza Bologna, has also become one of his best known; it was the setting for Ettore Scola's 1977 film Una Giornata Particolare (A Special Day), starring Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren in a drama set in Fascist Rome in 1938. The building is on Itinerary 8 in Rome the Second Time.

Bill