What is Rome? Where is the real Rome? Where does it begin and where does it end? Rome is surely the most beautiful city in Italy, if not the world. But it is also the most ugly, the most welcoming, the most dramatic, the richest, the most wretched. Films have helped make it known to those who do not live here. But one must be careful. The Neorealist vein that characterizes the films about Rome is too schematic, too dialectically partial, too filled with humanitarian optimism and darkness to reveal, with its medium gray or pinkish tones, the atmosphere of this dramatically contradictory city. The contradictions of Rome are difficult to transcend because they are contradictions of an existential order. Rather than traditional contradictions, between wealth and misery, happiness and horror, they are part of a magma, a chaos.
To the eyes of the foreigner and the visitor, Rome is the city contained within the old Renaissance walls. The rest is a vague, anonymous periphery, unworthy of interest.
Within the walls lies a beautiful Italian city which, rather than revealing uniquely classical, medieval, Communal, Renaissance, or baroque traditions, reveals all of these at once. If it were sectioned, one would see an extraordinary proliferation of layers: this is the source of the city’s great beauty. Add to that the sun, the soft air, the joy of a life lived outdoors—never truly idyllic, bearing a dramatic core, and which therefore can never be boring. It is always alive, moving…Add also the fact that the petite bourgeoisie and grande bourgeoisie do not play an important role in the city center, which is still characterized by the lower classes, as in the southern and Bourbon cities, filled with fictitious vitality and servile paganism.
The Rome that is unknown to tourists, ignored by the right-minded, and nonexistent on maps, is immense.
The ignorant tourist and the upstanding citizen who covers his eyes can catch a glimmer of this disproportionate city, sunken into thousands of grandiose and disparate pools, if he bothers to look out the window of his train or bus. Before his unseeing eyes, clusters of hovels will fly by, expanses of shacks like Bedouin camps, collapsed ruins of mansions and sumptuous cinemas, ex-farmhouses compressed between high-rise buildings, dikes with high walls, narrow muddy alleyways, and sudden empty spaces, empty lots and small fields with a few heads of livestock. Beyond all of this, in the burned or muddy countryside, marked by little hills, ditches, old pits, plateaus, sewers, ruins, trash piles and dumps, lies the true face of the city. Here lies a deceptive line of homes that twists and turns along the contorted horizon. And now a colorful heap, grandiose as an apparition, on the unpredictable ridge of a hillside. Over here, we see an enormous gray wall that looms above the viaducts and the railway bridges like an overhanging rock.
It is not easy to impose some measure of order on this chaos. But certain types and zones can be made out, perhaps by gradations in the level of life. There is also a generic, so-called “residential” periphery, where the ugliness—despite the sun—is merely aesthetic. But the periphery of the underclass acquires a more dehumanizing, violent, inaccessible aspect, which is difficult to interpret.
The diagonals of the Consular Roads—the Appia, Prenestina, Tuscolana, Casilina, Aurelia, etc.—form another city around the real city, complicated by traditional agglomerations of people, by its inextricable but established “levels of culture.” It is not clear whether this other city is centrifugal or centripetal, whether it forms something new or whether it amasses itself around the old city in order to assimilate itself in it, like the enormous campground of an invading army.
It seems to have been born by chance, to have grown to giant proportions for no reason, to live an existence which is neither its own nor marginal to something else. When one observes this phenomenon of the city that grows from year to year, month to month, day to day, the only way to comprehend it is through the eyes. The visual spectacle is so distressing, grandiose, and senseless, that it seems possible to resolve it only through intuition, by a series of uninterrupted observations, almost like cinematic “takes”; an infinite number of very particular close-ups, and an infinite number of boundless panoramic shots.
The spectacle for the eye is inexhaustible from the Monte Mario neighborhood to Monteverde, from San Paolo to the Appio, from the Prenestino to Monte Sacro.102 The building boom has no limits.
Just as it is extremely difficult to describe the shape of the city’s advance (one would have to repeat oneself a thousand times and find a thousand variations), so it is difficult to define the people who live there.
Rome, as we know, is still teeming with the sub-proletariat (Trastevere, Borgo Panico, Campo dei Fiori, etc., etc.), and therefore with anarchy and crime. The first Roman factories and mini-factories are beginning to line up along the Tiburtina. The only robust industry, at least until a few years ago, is the film industry, the “model industry” of Rome’s working world. It is an industry that does not necessarily imply a consciousness of social class, but tends to perpetuate a passive psychological state and conformism in the people who work there, an attitude typical of a city with such a recent (and imported) democratic tradition.
The hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of these new neighborhoods (and of the old ones, which were once almost rural, and are now completely surrounded and swallowed up by the new ones) belong, insofar as it is possible to define such a complex phenomenon, to a new Roman working class. In its dialect and vocabulary, attitudes, unscrupulous intelligence, moral laxness, and modernity, this new class appears to be the same as the old. But its more regular lifestyle, the cohabitation with immigrants103 from the North and from the South, and its marginalization, a condition particularly vulnerable to bourgeois “ideological bombardment,” have tended to mutate the deep mix of anarchy and common sense of these people into a kind of American-style indifference, a “standardized” type, repeated obsessively, hundreds of thousands of times.
Life in these boundless areas is reduced to elementary, monotonous formulas.
The problem of relegating groups of people to a system of marginalized residential areas and centralized work areas, and forcing them into an endless repetition of the actions that drive the very system of their lives will affect the future even more vividly than the confused present.
For those who attempt to look beyond the city’s façade, the more immediate problem is an extremely simple one. Despite the building boom the difficulty of obtaining housing remains unchanged. The 110,000 units built in the last year have not altered the situation. And then there is the looming tragedy of unemployment within the building industry.
From the inside, then, the city has two faces: that of those who build, and that of those who reside here.
The builders are few, and ever since the recent building scandal and the constant accusations in the press, we all know what this industry is all about. An enormous number of people live here, and, even if they are perhaps proud of their new mini-apartment on the seventh floor of one of the hundred buildings that crowd together here, they still sleep four or five to a room. The notion of well-being which the ideological influence of the ruling classes has depended on ever since the advent of television and pinball machines, and which is ushering in the Americanism I spoke of earlier, is in reality another form of chaos, misery, instability. It is even more damaging because it is fed to the public under the label of well-being, of betterment, while in reality we are still at square one.
Vie Nuove, Rome, May 24, 1958.
This and the two following pieces are part of an investigation that Pasolini did for Vie Nuove, entitled “Journey In and Around Rome.”