Junking a Scooter

Older model Hexagon (not ours)

In previous recent posts, we've covered the basics of scootering in Rome: renting, riding, and parking.  But what about getting rid of a scooter that's seen its better days?  How do you junk a scooter in Rome?

The Italians have a word for it: rottamazione, a word related to other words that have something to do with breaking: rotto (broken), rottame (scrap, fragment), and rottura (breaking).  Behind the word rottamazione is a legal and bureaucratic process, and one that we experienced first-hand several years ago when our beloved Piaggio Hexagon bit the dust (or so we thought) on via Cristoforo Colombo.  We ended up in a parking lot just off Piazza dei Navigatori, took a bus the wrong direction, and...well, it was a bad day. 

Saying goodbye to the Hexagon

In the next few days we learned the word for junking and contacted one of the small agencies that facilitate things.  For E50, these guys showed up with a van and took the scooter away, presumably to a junkyard or demolition site.  Then we waited for the head guy to show up at his little office, where we gave him the info while he filled out the paperwork, all this complicated by the fact that we didn't even really, legally, own the scooter we were junking (that's another story).  Finally we were told that the scooter might find a new life in the Marche, where polluting 2-cycle vehicles were still valued, and that if we agreed to consign the vehicle to him, he would find it a new owner and return our E50.  Five years later we got a ticket, which originated in the Marche, for having failed to have the vehicle inspected--four years ago, after it left our hands.

Unidentifiable techno-carcass

Anyway, from the looks of Rome's streets and the country roads outside the city, the official process described above is seldom used.  When scooters get old, owners dump them in the countryside, where one sees the remains on seldom-used hiking trails (most hiking trails in Italy are seldom used) and in ravines. 

Unofficial disposal method

Urban disposal, which must take place where ravines and hiking trails are few, is accomplished differently.  Inside the city, the standard technique is to leave the offending scooter wherever it happens to be--usually chained to a signpost on the sidewalk--and walk away, confident that months and years of simple neglect, and those eager for free spare parts, will reduce it to a pile of junk.  E50 saved.  A scooter in the same place, day after day, with a thick layer of dirt and dust, has been junked. 

Almost a work of art

Junking a bicycle is easier, and always follows the "chain-it-and-walk-away" method. 
Bill

RST Top 40. #8: Monte Testaccio and l'ex Mattatoio - play among Roman ruins



Looking down into Testaccio from the Monte



We’ve always been intrigued by Monte Testaccio – the “mountain” made of ancient Roman castoff earthen vessels that sits in the eponymous neighborhood. The Monte, combined with the ex-slaughterhouse now art museum l’ex Mattatoio, is easily in the top 10 of Rome the Second Time’s Top 40, coming in at #8. 



Footpath made of "cocci" or
broken shards



The archeologists finally got wise and fenced off Monte Testaccio. You now can only go with groups – and we recommend a tour, tho’ they are infrequent in English. Some photos from the top and a video clip of Marcello Mastroianni and Monica Vitti from an Ettore Scola film are featured in an earlier post. The caves built into the mountain from around the outside now feature hip bars and cafes. Ah, progress.



Graffiti on grounds

The ex-Mattatoio has had an amazing conversion to art space. New halls opened even this past year. Modern art exhibits show well in these halls. We never miss a chance to see a show here. The gallery, run by the city and now called MACRO Testaccio (nee MACRO Future) used to be free, but even at Euro 5, the shows and space are worth it (note – the gallery is open 4 p.m. – midnight, Tuesday – Sunday). See the link here for information in English on a current exhibit.

One of the gallery halls in MACRO Testaccio

The ex-Mattatoio grounds also feature extensive graffiti, an ecologically driven café, market, meeting hall, etc., and rather permanent squatters from Eastern Europe, enjoying their beer.


Bill, getting "into" the art

The neighborhood –working class and gritty, historically-- keeps getting gentrified, including a new market about to open. See Bill’s post on the gentrification of Rome's markets.

Inside MACRO Testaccio are plenty of bar and cafe' places, amid what used to be slaughterhouse pens.




A trendy restaurant built into the caves of Monte Testaccio



Lots of places to eat and drink here, but the locals’ favorite for a glass of wine is just across the street from the entrance (if you could get in) to Monte Testaccio, at the corner of via Zabaglia and via Galvani. 



Dianne

Fashion and Fascism: The Sordid Story of Dior's John Galliano

John Galliano

We were intrigued by Rhonda Garelick's op-ed piece in the March 7 New York Times on the unsavory conduct of John Galliano, Dior's weird and notorious creative director, who had been fired from his $5 million post a few days earlier for saying awful things in a Paris bar, La Perle.  On one occasion--unfortunately for Galliano, caught on a cellphone--he told a nearby woman "I love Hitler" and added, "People like you would be dead.  Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f....... gassed."  In another bar rant, it was "Dirty Jewish face, you should be dead," followed by a critique of the woman's body and attire: "Your boots are of the lowest quality, your thighs are of the lowest quality.  You are so ugly I don't want to see you.  I am John Galliano!"

 A poster of Mussolini with the "right" sort of Italian
 woman: plain, with child, humbly dressed

Garelick takes the next step, connecting Galliano's vitriol to fascism's use of the fashion industry during the Vichy years of the 1940s, when French fashion fell under the sway of the Nazis and became a servant of Nazi and Vichy propaganda.  "Our role," said one Vichy designer, "is to give France the face of serenity.  The more elegant Frenchwomen are, the more our country will show the world that we are not afraid."  Many French designers for women bought into Aryan ideals of youth, beauty, physical fitness and physical perfection--defined as blue eyes, blond hair, and "sharp-angled features"--that today, Garelick notes, can still be found in the work of Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.  For Garelick, Galliano is a version of the "fascist demagogue of yore," using the simplest of measures--what one wears, how one looks, whether one is defined as attractive or not--to exclude and, in his fantasy, kill. 

At left, the Fascist ideal of womahood.  At right, the threatening
 woman: thin, dissolute, fashionable.  1931

The Italian experience is similar and different.  Italian fascism was deeply concerned about women's bodies and dress, but more fearful than their French counterparts about the sexualized women's body, women's physical fitness, and high fashion.  Concerned about "scandalous" dress, Mussolini's Fascists created a National Committee for Cleaning Up Fashion (1927-), which for two years worried about things like the skirt lengths of small-town girls.  Unlike the French, fascism in Italy by-and-large rejected women who were too thin or pale, while valuing the "authentic woman," dedicated above all else to maternity, with her rounded figure and peasant costume ("in a narrow womb/the chick is doomed").  The Duce's Fascists were gung-ho about muscles and manliness and men's physical fitness, but exercise for women was another matter: no skimpy uniforms, no athleticism (the Olympics an exception), no male sports like soccer, nothing that might encourage lesbian relationships.


Properly uniformed, but dangerously
emancipated.  Siena, 1943 



Fashion posed a particular problem for Italian fascism.  During the early years of the Mussolini regime--through about 1933--high fashion was encouraged, but only for the country's social elite.  In these years, there were fashion shows at the Excelsior and Grand Hotels in Rome, and in the Rose Casino of the Borghese Gardens, and even--in 1933--the first Permanent National Fashion Exposition in Turin--all of this applauded as an expression of the nation's elite--that is, the Fascists.  By 1935 the tide had turned, and in 1938, as war approached, Mussolini launched an anti-bourgeois "reform of custom" that reviled luxury and top-down fashion and trumpeted the virtues of having as many women as possible in rough-wool uniforms (photo right) or, at least, wide skirts and shawls. 



So, for Mussolini's Fascists, as for Dior's Galliano, fashion was a way to define who had value and who did not.  In the 1930s, that decision could have unthinkable consequences.  Today, probably not--just John Galliano, a little drunk and struggling with his own Jewish heritage, raving in a bar. 

Special thanks to Victoria De Grazia, for material drawn from her outstanding book (cover photo above right), How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (University of California Press, 1992). 

Bill

On the Road in Libya: The Arch of the Fileni

Here at the multi-story headquarters of Rome the Second Time, we once again feel compelled to temporarily suspend our regular programming to bring you a timely special report.  It replaces another timely special report. 

According to this morning's paper, rebel troops are on the move in Libya, freed from the trap at Ajdabiya, pursuing the retreating Libyan army around the Gulf of Sirte and through the Sirte desert through Brega, Uqaylah, and Ras Lanuf, heading toward Qaddafi's home town of Surt. 



Arch of the Fileni, c. 1940

 This act in the Libyan drama has been played out on a highway that follows the coast line.  And what an historic highway it is.  The equivalent of Eisenhower's interstate highway system, the road unites eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) with western Libya (Tripolitania).  It was built and paved only in the 1930s, a truly monumental accomplishment, by mostly Libyan crews working under the occupying colonial power, Italy, which had invaded the country in 1911.

For a time (and perhaps still) it was known as the via Balbia, or the via Balbo, after Italo Balbo, the larger-than-life figure who became governor of Libya in 1934 and under whose watch the highway was completed three years later.  The formal name for the 822 kilometer highway was the Litoranea-Libica. 

What the rebel army didn't see as they approached Ras Lanuf from the east was an enormous arch, built over the new highway in 1937 as a sign of the road-building, unifying achievement, as well as Italian might and hegemony.  The Qaddafi regime demolished  the arch in 1970--blew it up with dynamite--just a year after the whacky dictator took power, no doubt because the new government didn't savor a prominent reminder of 3 decades of European colonial rule.  He had a point. 

The flamboyant Balbo stood for what
the Italians wanted to be. 

The Arch of the Fileni, as the Italians called it, was of enormous symbolic value, perhaps especially for Balbo.  In 1933, the energetic Fascist--and a skilled pilot--had led an expedition of 25 Italian aircraft on a 19,000 mile journey from the airfield at Orbetello (in Tuscany) to Chicago and back, becoming a national hero on his return.  (It was only 6 years after Lindbergh's historic crossing of the Atlantic, and the Italians were aviation fanatics).  Balbo and his fellow aviators were rewarded with the ultimate demonstration of Mussolini's admiration: a trumphal march under the Arch of Constantine.  "The Duce has conceded to us," Balbo explained, "the culminating moment of the triumph of Rome."  Together, Balbo and the Arch of Constantine symbolized Italy's return to the glory and dominance that the Fascists identified with imperial Rome. 

March 1937.  Mussolini at the dedication. 

Balbo must have been pleased, then, when Mussolini announced he was coming to Libya in March to celebrate the completion of the highway, and that the ceremony would reprise the triumphal proceedings of 1933.  For the evening dedication, Balbo had surrounded the isolated arch with flaming tripods and illuminated the upper reaches of the structure with searchlights.  Airplanes buzzed overhead.  Positioned around the arch was a representative assortment of Libyan soldiers, Italian and Libyan work crews, and native honor guards aboard camels.  Ugo Ojetti, Balbo's art critic and friend, was there, describing Mussolini's arrival, the power of the moment, and the Duce's remarks to those assembled.  "He speaks to them in syllabes," wrote Ojetti:  "Be proud to have left this symbol of fascist power in the desert."  "Workers and natives begin to strike the air in two tempos: 'Duce du ce...Do ce do ce.'"  Later, as Mussolini observed the glorious arch from his tent, "the Arabs begin to shout joyfully, to strike tambourines, to twist and jump, to dance and to whirl...."  The Arabs wouldn't always feel that way. 

Bronzes of the Fileni brothers, originally in the
slot (see photo at top)  just above the curve of the arch.

The arch was generally known to Libyans, and not surprisingly, as El Gaus (The Arch).  In the desert campaigns of World War II, the allied armies referred to it as The Marble Arch.  It was commissioned as the Arch of the Litoranea.  It was more commonly known, at least to Italians, as the Arch of the Fileni, for an event that took place long before, on the very spot that Balbo had chosen to erect his monument.  

Many centuries ago, when the country was divided between the Carthaginians on the West and the Greek Cyraneans on the East, the two peoples had agreed to settle their disputed border by an unusual method.  At the same hour of the same day, ambassadors of the Carthaginians were to leave Carthage and march east, while ambassadors of the Cyreneans were to leave their capitol and travel west.  The border between the nations was to be located at the place of their meeting.  The team from Carthage, two brothers named Philaeni (Fileni in the Italian spelling), pressed hard and made good time, while the representatives of Cyranea failed to move with the same haste.  When the groups met, the Cyraneans, assuming that the Carthaginians had jumped the gun, refused to agree to the original terms of the compact.  Instead, they offered the Fileni brothers a difficult choice: either they could be buried alive then and there, and mark the border with their graves, or they could agree to allow the Cyraneans to advance westward as far as they wanted--but under the same penalty.  "Without hesitation, according to a 1940 retelling of the story, "the brothers accepted the first alternative."  In gratitude, the Carthaginians built two altars over the tomb.  Erected adjacent to the altars of the Fileni, Balbo's arch commemorated this act of selfless courage, inspired by the nation.  Above the arch, an inscription paid homage, on the one hand, to the power of the city of Rome ("Oh, kind Sun, may you never look upon a city greater than Rome"); on the other hand, to the Fileni brothers, for "their sacrifice for the greatness of the Patria."  

Fragments of the bas-reliefs.  On the left, salutes to
Mussolini

Today, all that remains of the Arch of the Fileni are two bronze statues (photo above left) of the Fileni brothers, and fragments of bas-reliefs, all "stored" in a field at Madinat Sultan, in case anyone should care to visit.  Until recently the remnants were behind a fence but accessible--if you could wake up the guard. 

Bill

Elizabeth Taylor in Rome



Liz and the unsuspecting Eddie Fisher--with Burton?

"The only word Elizabeth knows in Italian is Bulgari," her 5th husband, Richard Burton, once remarked, referring to the storied merchant of jewels.  Richard had kindled the Bulgari passion in Elizabeth in 1962, when the two were in Rome for 215 days filming Cleopatra (1964) on mammoth sets on the lot of Cinecitta'.  Though already married (Liz to Eddie Fisher), the lovebirds had secretly rented a pink stucco bungalow in Porto Santo Stefano, on the promontory of Argentario, perhaps an hour from Rome.  (Scandalized at hearing of her conduct, a member of Congress sought to have English-born Taylor banned from re-entering the United States.)

A forlorn Richard and Elizabeth following a car
accident in or near Rome, 1962



Wearing Bulgari Serpenti, 1962

 While trying to manage their affair, deal with the Vatican's condemnation of Elizabeth as "a woman of loose morals," figure out a future for themselves, and process the likelihood of an imminent visit by Richard's wife, Elizabeth became ill.  She had her stomach pumped at Salvator Mundi Hospital and, later, Richard sought to soothe the beast with a $150,000 emerald brooch from Bulgari.  It was the beginning of a love affair--with Bulgari this time--and in June, 2009 this affair was consummated with a spectacular showing of some 500 of Elizabeth's Bulgari items at the Palazzo delle Esposizione on via Nazionale.  That occasion was the 125th anniversary of Bulgari's store in Rome.  As Margo Jefferson wrote in the New York Times in 1999, Taylor was "full of no-nonsense shamelessness."  "Whether it's about how she ages or what she wears, she has, bless her heart, made the principles of good and bad taste equally meaningless."  On the set, she wore diamonds while playing dominoes.  She was vulgar but not vain.   

As Cleopatra

Cleopatra enjoyed some success at the box office, but not enough to justify the extraordinary cost of production.  The set for Alexandria, the Egyptian capital where the real Cleopatra met Julius Caesar in like 56 BC, was the largest, most elaborate, and most expensive ever made.  But if the film was an economic bust, it was a highly symbolic one.  With Roman Holiday, it was the best known of a group of the "Hollywood sul Tevere" (Hollywood on the Tiber) films, many of them filmed on sets at Cinecitta' and collectively responsible for drawing a generation of film stars to the Eternal City--among them Deborah Kerr, Gregory Peck, Rod Steiger, and Dick and Liz--and in the process helping to create the glamorous and decadent era of via Veneto and the paparazzi.  (See our post on Hollywood films made in Rome in the postwar era.)

Made in the early 1960s, at the height of American power and hubris,  Cleopatra was a visual representation of the nation's world dominance in the postwar era and of its dreams--not to be realized--of a future characterized by American hegemony in the world.  And the scene that best captured that historical American moment featured Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, entering Rome on a massive 30-foot pedestal pulled by hundreds of slaves, to the acclaim of thousands.   

1961, with Eddie Fisher and
Kirk Douglas and his wife

Taylor did not appear in Spartacus (1960), another of the Hollywood-sul Tevere films, but she had been drawn to Rome in 1961, accompanied by her husband Eddie Fisher, to celebrate the film's 1st anniversary with its star, Kirk Douglas (today, after her death, Taylor is being called the last movie star--but Kirk's still alive).  

With Eddie Fisher

Elizabeth was in Rome at least two other times.  She and 3rd husband Mike Todd were there in 1958; later that year he died in the crash of a plane named "Lucky Liz."  With Eddie she attended the opening of the Rome Olympics in 1960.  

Rome 1966.  An informal moment.  Liz in a cast
with a '60s look, Richard as Hemingway

And she was back again in 1966, for no obvious reason.  On the 28th of March, she showed up with Richard at Rome's Opera House, her hair in an exaggerated, fantastical bun decorated with bands of jewels and a jeweled hairpin that spilled over onto her forehead.  Looking a lot like Cleopatra.  Elizabeth Taylor lived most of her life in Beverly Hills, and New York was a second home.  But Rome--especially the delicious, over-heated Rome of the early 1960s--was a grand stage for a woman of great appetite and enormous talent. 

Bill