Ponte Ostiense: Under Construction

Through a hole in the fence.

In October, we pulled the scooter off Via Ostiense for a quick look at another of Rome's new bridges.  We couldn't get all that close, but we did manage to get a good pic looking through a hole in the fence (right); another with the camera held over the fence (below); and a third of a big on-site posting listing everyone who was working on the project and a rendering of what it was supposed to look like when completed. 

Lots of lanes.

The new bridge, over the Metro tracks and the Roma-Lido railway, will connect the heavily-trafficked Circonvallazione Ostiense (with Garbatella to the south and Ostiense to the north) with Via Ostiense, a major north-south thoroughfare that runs right into the Pyramid.  That's fine, but the real purpose of the bridge is apparently to connect Via Cristoforo Colombo (an enormous highway heading to the ocean) on the east with Viale Marconi, on the west.  And to do that adequately will mean another bridge, this one to span the Tevere below the old, out-dated, over-used, but loved Ponte di Ferro ("Iron bridge", officially Ponte dell'Industria).

The Spine

On its west side, the bridge will touch down right next to the now-abandoned Magazzini Generali (General Storage Area--a now-abandoned massive market/wholesale distribution center), to be redesigned by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.  There is also a larger, visionary project involved, the brainchild of former mayor Walter Veltroni, something called the Citta' di Giovani (City of Youth), which imagines revitalizing Ostiense, an older industrial but already trendy area with bars, clubs, and restaurants catering to young people.  (Of course, the young folks already have started up their bars and clubs here, as we've reported - more than once.)  Apparently Koolhaas is in charge of the larger project. 

Elegant Curves

We would like to credit Koolhaas as the architect of the bridge, but no one is saying that, and the designer of the structure remains a mystery,  Nor does the bridge have a name, although it is sometimes referred to as the Ponte Ostiense.  Rome's commissioner of public works proudly announced that a bridge of this type--arches supported by steel wires was his description--would be a first for the city, and he may be right.  The structure is 240 meters from end to end, with 125 meters fully suspended.  Three vehicle lanes each direction (two of the six for public vehicles), and ample sidewalks for pedestrians. 

Ponte della Musica

We claim no expertise in bridge design, but we like the look of this one.  We would have liked it more had we not seen the new pedestrian (so far) Ponte della Musica (right), over the Tevere to the north, with its wavy curves fashioned from white tubing, not unlike the emerging Ponte Ostiense.  (See our earlier post on that bridge.) After all, we're in the era of the designer bridge--like the 1950s was the era of the glass skyscraper--and some of the designs, despite their obvious differences, have a similar look and style.  Not bad, just not "wow we haven't seen that before." 

Bill

Fascism and the Reconstruction of Rome

What was the Via dell'Impero, from
Piazza Venezia, looking toward the Coliseum.
Vehicles were prohibited that day.

Via dell'Impero

Here at RST, we knew, or thought we knew, why Mussolini's Fascist regime of the 1920s and 1930s tore down thriving neighborhoods and moved thousands of families from the central city to its outskirts.  The Fascists did it, so the story goes, because they wanted to reveal and display the glorious monuments and remains of Roman antiquity, and to link that Roman heritage--a formidable lineage of empire and dominance--to Fascism.  Via dell' Impero ("Empire Street"; today, Via dei Fori Imperiali - "Street of the Imperial Forums") was carved from surrounding neighborhoods not only to reveal the Roman forums along its course, but to establish a powerful visual link between the Coliseum, at one end, and Mussolini's headquarters, at Piazza Venezia, at the other.  On the other side of the massive Vittoriano (the "typewriter" monument to the King Vittorio Emanuele II - photo below), Via del Mare ("Street of the Sea," today, Via del Teatro Marcello) proclaimed Rome's ties to the sea and reaffirmed Fascism's imperial vision and designs. 

That's all true.  But it's not enough, and it doesn't go to the heart of the matter.  Not according to historian Paul Baxa, whose exceptional new book, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (University of Toronto Press, 2010), offers a complementary--and, in our view, wholly new, and somewhat controversial--interpretation of Fascism's interventions and urban planning.   

And, for more on Fascism and the construction of Rome, see our new book, Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler. More on the book is at the end of this post.

Trenches on the Carso

According to Baxa, the key to understanding Fascism's reconstruction of Rome lies in the Italian experience in the Great War, in which the Italian army faced the forces of Austria-Hungary, first in a grisly, violent and brutal trench-warfare standoff on the Carso, a massive plateau near Trieste; then, in a high-speed, helter-skelter Italian retreat across the plain of Friuli, north of Venice.  (Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is set in this warfare and retreat.)

Fascism's "new man," at what
was the Foro Mussolini

Embedded in the contrasting landscapes of the Carso and the Friuli plain, the trial of war was profoundly psychological.  Using a variety of sources, including postwar memoirs, poetry, and Fascist-oriented journals, Baxa argues that the Carso meant stasis, lack of movement, confinement, restriction and claustrophia, and it created Fascism's "new man," "savage" and "primordial" (in Fascist mythology, Mussolini's Blackshirts were Italian warriors--represented in the statues that line the Foro Mussolini--who had fought on the Carso).  Though encountered in retreat, the Friuli plain meant release, liberation, endless open space, the high speed movement of vehicles away from the trauma of the Carso.

The beginning of the Via Del Mare, 1930s.
Teatro di Marcello in the distance; the beginning of Michelangelo's stairs to the Campidoglio (the Capitoline Hill)  in the foreground. 

The Fascist reconstruction of Rome, accomplished under the Master Plan of 1931, was nothing less than the experiences on the Carso and the Friuli plain, inscribed on the map of Rome.  Reacting to the confinement and stasis of the Carso, Fascism detested urban elements that restricted movement, especially small piazzas, narrow streets and dense neighborhoods.  Hence the construction of the Via del Mare necessarily and deliberately involved the destruction of two piazzas: Michelangelo's Piazza Aracoeli at the foot of the Campidoglio, and Piazza Montanara, close by the Theatre of Marcellus.  Similarly, part of the dense neighborhood of San Lorenzo was razed to make way for the new, modernist University of Rome. 

The Vittoriano--detested by the Fascists (and
some others)

The flight across the Friuli plain was reflected in the Fascist mania for broad avenues capable of carrying vehicles at high speed; the Via dell' Impero and the Via del Mare were about speed and modernity and danger, values captured, according to Baxa, in Mussolini's motorcycle rides to his summer home in Ostia, on the sea.  When Hitler visited Rome in 1938, Baxa notes, his itinerary included only one church (the Pantheon), and he "spent most of his time in the car."

Although Rome's legendary traffic has commonly been understood as a city planning failure, Baxa argues that it was "the crowning achievement of fascist culture."  Indeed, at the south end of Piazza Venezia, Fascist street planning was designed to corrupt and degrade the Vittoriano, a monument that for Fascism was a symbol of a failed and decadent bourgeois liberalism.  The more cars, and the less attention to the monument glorifying Vittorio Emanuele and the liberal state, the better. 

For Baxa, the "new man" who had come down from the Corso was primordial, a throwback to imperial pagan Rome.  For Fascism and its archaeologists, this meant that pagan Rome and the present were everything that was good and valued, and whatever was in between--the apostles, the rise of Christian Rome, the hundreds of churches of medieval Rome and Renaissance Rome--was of little consequence.  For Mussolini, writes Baxa, "the grandeur of Rome was independent of Christianity."  As a result, the Fascist regime clashed with Catholic Church at every turn: over what should be revealed, what should be preserved, what should be valued. 

Similarly, Fascism's embrace of pagan Rome and the Fascist present involved a distaste for everything else, especially the 19th-century, the heyday of liberalism and the bourgeoisie; and areas that represented, or symbolized, the 19th-century received scant attention.  Case in point: Via Nazionale, with the Vittoriano at one end, the 19th-century Piazza Esedra at the other, and fancy shops serving the haut-bourgeoisie lining the avenue.  In 1932, when the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, at the heart of Via Nazionale, was selected to house a major exhibition on Fascism, the neo-classical facade of building was temporarily covered with a rationalist veneer. 

Much of Baxa's view of Fascism and its urban interventions depends on the battle on the Carso and the retreat across the Friuli plain, and what those events meant not only for participants, but for all Italians.  Baxa makes the case that the peculiar character of World War I in northeast Italy yielded a set of ideas and values--violence, brutality, speed, the need for space and openness, a fascination with the automobile--that would shape Fascism and with it, the face of Rome.  Yes, and bravo to Baxa for making the connection.  But it might make almost as much sense to argue that the horrific trench warfare on the Carso produced a deep pacifism, or that the retreat across Friuli left in its wake a consciousness of Italian weakness, including even the desire to retreat from future wars.  That said, this is a strikingly original book, and one likely to force a rethinking of how and why Mussolini's Fascist regime changed the look and feel of modern Rome.

Bill

For more on Fascist architecture, see the EUR and the Foro Italico itineraries in our new print AND eBook,  Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler.  Modern Rome features tours of the "garden" suburb of Garbatella; 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 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.

New York City, or Rome? A Response to Michael Kimmelman

A portion of New York City's "grid"

We thoroughly enjoyed Michael Kimmelman's celebration of New York City's "grid" design in the January 3, 2012 New York Times.  He's one of our favorites.  Mr. (following NYT practice) Kimmelman, in reviewing a current exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, describes the grid as "in many ways the defining feature of the city," a "boon to private development" and, "almost despite itself, a creative template."  For Mr. Kimmelman, the city's grid suggests the sort of "aggressive and socially responsible leadership" that we so badly need in today's difficult times.  (Be patient, dear reader, we'll get to Rome).

While acknowledging that the grid was in a way "heartless" and even "monotonous," he remains convinced that it was a positive development: it proved responsive to the city's changing compass orientation; profitable for property owners; ecologically beneficial; conducive to sociability and building variety; "oddly beautiful"; and--a virtue that Mr. Kimmelman gives special weight and attention--made the city instantly comfortable and knowable, even for strangers. 

A model of the Roman Forum

Inevitably, perhaps, the world's other great cities, notably Paris and Rome, must enter the argument.  Rome does so twice.  Mr. Kimmelman argues that "grid plans went back to ancient Greece and Rome."  We can't speak for Greece, but the little we've seen on ancient Rome suggests that the early city, built in part on hills that flaunted the sort of strict, unrelenting grid on which New York City was based, could have served as the basis for Gotham's design.  Although the Roman Forum is constructed within a rectangle, the buildings on the Palatine Hill are set at an angle to it.

A portion of a c. 1910 Rome map.  At lower left,
on the right side of the river, a grid-based
Testaccio, waiting to be developed, and above it,
the Aventine, in a similar state

Beyond the Centro Storico, outlying sections of Rome, including Prati, Testaccio, and a part of the Aventine, used the grid, but these were not laid out until the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Mr. Kimmelman's reference to "Rome" is likely to the grid system widely used to build towns outside the capital but within the burgeoning Roman empire. 

Rome appears in a second context, in an interesting and revealing comparison to New York.  "In the same way," Mr. Kimmelman writes, "that tourists who come to New York can easily grasp the layout and, as such, feel they immediately possess the city, outsiders who move here become New Yorkers simply by saying so.  By contrast, an American can live for half a century in Rome or Hamburg or Copenhagen or Tokyo but never become Italian or German or Danish or Japanese.  Anybody can become a New Yorker.  The city, like its grid, exists to be adopted and made one's own." 

There's some hyperbole here--"half a century"?--and the argument that a feeling of belonging can be traced to the grid, rather than to the city's (and the nation's) function as a cultural melting pot seems forced, to say the least.  We could make the case, too, that New York City's most creative folks have preferred the old city, below the grid, and especially Greenwich Village: Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jackson Pollock  Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Eugene O'Neill, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jane Jacobs, and [fill in the blank].

In one sense, though, we couldn't agree more.  Rome is a much more complex city than New York and much more difficult to learn.  It's full of curves and unusual angles, of piazzas, square and round and oval, that surge with energy, of parts that fit oddly and subtly into a whole that remains an intricate puzzle, replete with mystery.  It has hills (more than 7, actually) and a river, one that runs through the center of the city and whose twists and turns and bridges contribute to a sense of organic complexity.  Rome's cityscape--its imprint, its pattern--could never be described as "heartless" or "monotonous" or damned by the faint praise of "oddly beautiful."  That's why we can visit year after year and each time feel a kind of rebirth, as if we were seeing, and knowing, the city anew.  That's why being on a scooter is Rome is a pleasure and a thrill, no matter how often we do it.  And that's why  we wrote--why we felt compelled to write--Rome the Second Time.  You're interesting enough, New York City, but you're no Rome.
Bill
from Dianne: for another of Bill's "exchanges" with Kimmelman, see his post on MAXXI, Italy's 21st century art gallery - designed by Zaha Hadid -  in Rome.

Caught! A Small Drama in Piazza San Silvestro

It was early evening when we passed through Piazza San Silvestro.  Not long ago it would have been full of buses and people waiting for them, but the piazza has been reinvented, its function as a bus depot eliminated, and what we found was a huge empty space, filled with rubble and machinery, surrounded by a plastic and chain-link fence.  To serve businesses on the piazza--including the restaurant at far right, above--the sidewalks remained accessible. 

As we were walking by, a young woman mounted her scooter and, cautiously, but on the sidewalk, and with a shopping bag over one arm, headed north on the east side of the piazza.  Scooters using the sidewalk for a few yards, to find a place to park, are commonplace in Rome, but this woman's sidewalk journey was a longer one than usual: a whole block of sidewalk to cover before she reached a usable street. 

She didn't make it.  As luck would have it, as she neared the end of the block and was passing in front of the restaurant (with outside tables, also on the sidewalk), a police officer approached and--from what we could observe from afar--ordered her to turn around and walk the scooter back to where she had begun her sidewalk ride.  No ticket, but embarrassing.

Bill

Buona Giornata

First, a primer: buon giorno is "good day" or "good morning"; buona giornata is "have a good day," or "have a good one," or "have a nice day."  I can remember, or think I can, when clerks in the US started saying "have a nice day."  I thought then it was cloying and artificial and excessive, and though I've grown used to the phrase, it still grates on me.  I can't speak for Dianne, but I do know that she doesn't use "have a good day" in the States but has recently taken to using "buona giornata" in Rome, and merchants seem to respond well to it. 

The coffee cup combo in the photo, provided the bar by a major Rome milk distributor, takes "buona giornata" to a new level--indeed, takes possession of the phrase and offers it back:  "Sponsor Ufficiale della BUONA GIORNATA: Official sponsor of 'have a nice day.'" All, I hope, with a sense of irony--but even then I don't like it.
Bill