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We found this photo, from 1958, in an exhibit on Italian families at the Vittoriano.
It reminded us of Annette Funicello, also of Italian heritage, who emerged on television's Mickey Mouse Club and later starred in a series of "beach party" movies, wearing ever more revealing swimsuits. She was born in Utica, New York in 1942, and Funicello was her real name. Bill
"GABBO SEMPRE CON NOI!" Written on a wall in the Centro. But who was Gabbo?
A few days later, in our Tuscolano neighborhood:
i nostri colori our colors
ci dividono...la divide us...
mentalita ci mentality
unisce, "GOBBO" unites us, "GOBBO"
Was Gobbo "Gabbo"? And who was Gabbo?
We learned that Gabbo was short for Gabriele, and Gabriele was linked to another name. This in Tivoli: "Gabriele Vive...Spaccarotella Muori!" Gabriele lives...Spaccarotella dies!" And on a wall in Monteverde Vecchio: "Spaccarotella infame!" Spaccarotella infamous!
In a small piazza near Piazza Bologna, stickers had been placed on road signs:
Spaccarotella Spaccarotella
Pisceremo We piss on
Tua Tomba Your grave
Gabriele "Gabbo" Sandri and Luigi Spaccarotella were protagonists in a deadly drama played out on L'Autostrada del Sole (the Highway of the Sun), otherwise known as the A1. It was the morning of November 11, 2007, a Sunday, and all over Italy soccer fans were traveling to root for their favorite teams.
Gabriele Sandri
Gabriele, 26, was a professional DJ and a Lazio "Ultra"--a hard-core Lazio fan--and he was traveling with buddies to Milan for a game with the Inter team. The young men had pulled off the highway into the Badio al Pino service area near Arezzo, and a scuffle or fight had broken out with a group of supporters of Juventus, a Turin squad. From the service area on the other side of the highway--divided by a chain-link fence--a highway patrol policeman, Spaccarotella, had observed the quarrel across the way. Pulling his gun, he ran to the fence and fired a warning shot into the air. The young men scattered, and Gabriele and his friends jumped into their car and headed for the entrance to the highway. According to a video [below] (apparently shown later in the courtroom), Spaccarotella ran along the fence, then stopped, aimed, and fired his gun twice, hitting Gabriele--sitting in the middle of the front seat--in the neck, and killing him. The "action" in the video begins after about 15 seconds.
As the case worked its way through an inquiry and the court system, the tragic death of Gabriele Sandri--"Gabbo"--came to represent not just police violence but the inadequacies of the Italian judicial system. Spaccarotella had claimed that his gun had gone off by accident, while he was running, and so the original inquiry was based on a manslaughter charge. The prosecutor was unconvinced, and so was Gabriele's father, Giorgio Sandri, who appeared at the March, 2008 hearing, angry at Spaccarotella's absence and convinced that he had aimed and fired his gun with intent. "He doesn't have the courage to look us in the eyes," Sandri said, adding, "he knows well that what he did he didn't do because he was inciampato (stumbling). In us the emotion is strong, and the anger stronger still."
The court eventually found Spaccarotella guilty of "culpable homicide" and sentenced him to 6 years in prison; the prosecution had asked for 14 years, partly on the grounds that Spaccarotella had made a fraudulent claim. Reached soon after by telephone, Spaccarotella said "I cried with joy. I have done well to believe in justice."
Many Italians didn't see it that way. No sooner was the verdict and sentence announced than outcries filled the courtroom and the hallways outside. Giorgio Sandri was once again outraged, and his wife, Daniela, bitterly remarked, "Now they've killed me a second time. A shame for all of Italy." Lazio Ultras considered the verdict "against all of them" and attacked two police facilities, including one at Ponte Milvio in Rome. Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno--a former bad boy and probably a Lazio fan--expressed his dissatisfaction with the sentence, noting that the crime had affected the entire city. He hoped the sentence would be reconsidered on appeal "so as not to leave the Roman sporting world with a deep sense of injustice."
Spaccarotella had vowed to appeal the verdict and sentence, and it seems he did so; RST could find no evidence that he was actually serving his term.
The sentence was reconsidered. Based on a finding of "intentionality," in December, 2010 a Florence appeals court increased the sentence to 9 years 4 months. The court argued that even if Spaccarotella's goal had been to stop the vehicle and its occupants from fleeing, he took an excessive risk in shooting at the car. Hence the result--the death of Sandri--could not be understood as the product of "pure chance."
Gabbo's memory lived on, as the graffiti reveal.
He was remembered in 2009, at the final of the Champions League game between Manchester United and Lazio. Fans displayed a huge poster at one end of the field--the Lazio curva/curve, where the team's fans congregated. Lazio players wore "Gabbo" t-shirts under their game jerseys. Although Gabriele was a Lazio Ultra--on principle, reviled by fans of the Roma team--on this occasion even Roma supporters, who always sit on the curva sud, the south curve, when their team plays at Rome's Olympic Stadium, lent their support. One banner read, "Gabbo: Uno di Noi! Curva Sud." Gabbo: One of Us! Curva Sud."
A video, "Ciao Gabbo," tells the story of that day's tribute, which included a most extraordinary act of inter-team solidarity. Before the game, Lazio's captain accompanied Roma's captain, Francesco Totti, as Totti placed flowers below the poster of Gabriele: the famed leader of AS Roma, the symbol and idol of the Curva Sud, honoring a SS Lazio Ultra--at the Curva Nord.
The Tiburtina railroad station, the one near Piazza Bologna, was torn down about two years ago, and another took its place on November 28. The old station was on Itinerary 7 in Rome the Second Time. Not because it was of any architectural merit, but because it was the place where in October, 1943 over one thousand of Rome's Jews were put on sealed trains for shipment to Nazi concentration camps. Seventeen returned. Plaques on the station platform reminded travelers of that event of the massacre of more Jews, and other innocent people, by the Nazis at the Fosse Ardeatine. The plaques are gone--at best consigned to some remote storage facility--and unlikely to reappear.
The old station was small and crowded, and the new one should be a relief. But the dominant impression is hardly one of comfort. The new station is huge. Almost comically so. Like an aircraft carrier, or the hovering hunk of high-tech metal from outer space in the final scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Then, as one can see in the photo (right, center of photo), in July a fire consumed a portion of the new structure. The authorities are still investigating (don't hold your breath).
We'll have to wait to experience fully the new Tiburtina station. But one part of the new building appealed to us: a colorful, angular box at the front of the station, positioned in playful contrast to the glowering mass behind it. Almost as if the architect had had second thoughts and decided to include a day-care center.
Back in our apartment, we were shocked to pick up one of our architecture books, Rationalism and Architecture in Italy during Fascism (a translation from the Italian) and see, on the cover, a design for a building--not identified elsewhere in the book---not unlike the fanciful cube at Tiburtina. Had we not seen this drawing and seen it marked as an exampleof rationalism, we would have labeled it postmodern, if only for its complex window treatments, the use of the pink and blue (the colors of infancy), and the presentation of an unusual angularity that undermines a message of stark modernity. While cut from the same cloth, the Tiburtina box goes a step further--and lifts our spirits.
Bill
[A reminder from Dianne - when itineraries need to change (e.g., because the station with its plaques is torn down), Updates are provided in an online document, and thru the ebook versions of Rome the Second Time. Updates can be accessed with a click on the link on the blog at right, or right here.]
Our via Tuscolana neighborhood is served by mobile refuse workers who operate from small trucks that carry their buckets and brooms. These refuse trucks have also become the favorites of graffiti artists, who have applied their paints in a playful way, adding a nice touch to the streetscape. The shot below was taken on via Tuscolana.
Bill
Architect and designer Gio (pronounced "Joe," as in Giovanni) Ponti is little known in Rome. He was a child of Milan, born (1891) and raised there, and at a certain point plugged into Milan's fashion and design community. He designed stage sets and costumes for Milan's La Scala; the curvaceous La Pavoni espresso machine (1948), an icon of Italy's postwar boom and coffee-bar culture; and--perhaps his best known design effort--the Superleggera (superlight) chair [1957] for Cassina, so light that it is said that a child could lift it with one finger--though how many were given the opportunity, we don't know.
Pirelli Tower, 1956
Milan can also claim Ponti's first house (1926) and his best known building--the Pirelli Tower (1956), tall and sleek and, for a mid-century skyscraper, unusual in its diamond-referencing form.
Ponti's relationship with Fascism and the Mussolini regime are less than clear, but worth brief treatment. Postponing his architectural studies, he served in the Italian military on the Austrian front, emerging with the rank of Captain and as an admirer of Mussolini.
A Richard-Ginori dessert plate, ca. 1925
Degree in hand (1921), he turned not to architecture but to design, working as art director of the ceramics firm Richard-Ginori to produce a variety of consumer products that eschewed the avant-garde's commitment to pure rationalism in favor of mixing modernist ideas with neo-classical motifs.
Rotunda, Italia Pavilion, 1932
In the late 1920s, and especially through his magazine, Domus, Ponti became identified with the Novecento, an artistic movement increasingly favored by Facism for its advocacy of a "hybrid modernity" (see Marla Stone, The Patron State) that used traditional Italian folks motifs and subject matter, including women and landscapes. Ponti's design for the interior rotunda of the Italia pavilion at the 1932 Venice Biennale shows the architect linking modernism with classicism (here, referencing the Pantheon ceiling).
Mathematics Department Building, University of Rome, 1934
Ponti's only Rome building emerged at this juncture, just as the Mussolini regime was disengaging from Novecento aesthetics, embracing rationalism more fully, and before the regime's colonial ventures and burgeoning confidence fostered an architecture of monumentalism.
Completed in 1934, the Scuola di Matematica (Mathematics Department) building on the campus of the University of Rome is more in the rationalist mode than any of his previous structures. Today, the approach to the building is lined with dense banks of trees, square-trimmed in harmony with Ponti's modernist facade, which features thin marble facing and the standard high Fascist-like entryway, though the actual doors are modest and plain. A side view (above right) reveals the building's dynamic interior structure.
The immediate interior hall is also humble rather than extravagant, a sign, perhaps, that function is important; this is a working building, not a spectacle. Off to the left, a small, arched doorway, lined with aluminum (left), again plays down the grand.
Courtyard, Mathematics Building
Just ahead, we can see that the building has a round interior courtyard, and that the business of the Mathematics Department will take place in the curved spaces around it: offices on the inside of two long, curved hallways, classrooms on the outside. Natural light from the courtyard spills into the offices and, through glass partitions, on through onto the curving walkways.
A sign warns that the courtyard is not to be entered; another that loud talking in that space will disturb the learning process. Hundreds of cigarette butts between its stones reveal one of the courtyard's current functions. Two curving stairways in the courtyard seem to be there should a fire break out; we wonder if they're original.
The building's core rationalist aesthetic is everywhere tempered, by huge round windows in the stairwells, by the imperfect stones of the courtyard, by those playful arches in the entryway, and by small details of fittings and materials: brass handles here and there, wood trim around what would otherwise be an ordinary door (left).
Writing in Amate L'Architettura (1957), Ponti wrote: "Love architecture, be it ancient or modern. Love it for its fantastic, adventurous and solemn creations, for its inventions; for the abstract, allusive and figureative forms that enchant our spirit and enrapture our thoughts. Love architecture, the stage and support of our lives." Ponti's Mathematics Building--a graceful, functional stage.
