In every Italian city, even in the north of the country, beyond the last kitchen garden, you will find the “concentration camps” for the poor, made up mostly of warehouses, sheds, and shacks. But this reality is nowhere as impressive, complex, and I would say even grandiose, as in Rome. The Roman borgata104 is a thoroughly modern phenomenon that emerged out of the Fascist State, of which Rome was the capital. It is true that even today, these neighborhoods are being built. They are, in a manner of speaking, “free” neighborhoods, clusters of one- and-two-story roofless shacks, which have been left unfinished for years and years, unplastered, lime-white-colored in the countryside and half abandoned, sparkling or mud-stained like Bedouin villages. The roads are mostly caked with mud or dust. Look at Rebibbia, for example: a certain man by the name of Graziosi sold the land in lots, forcing the buyers (builders who were planning to build their own houses) into agreements by which they also bought the road bed, with the promise that the city would soon build a road there. Some buyers agreed, others didn’t (unbeknownst to the former), and so the fractioned road bed has remained just as it was. Instead of roads, the entire area is criss-crossed by dusty or flooded paths, depending on the season.
The Roman countryside, along the ring road, is teeming with borgate like this one.
These areas are home to people who are poor, but generally honest and hard working. Often they are immigrants, either from within the region or from nearby regions, people who have brought the serious and dignified atmosphere of the deep provinces to the chaos of the city and the smaller scale chaos of the neighborhoods they live in.
The real borgate are not these, however. The real borgate are characterized by their “official” nature. They were built by the city as part of a plan to cluster together the poor and the undesirables. This is their origin, both chronological and ideological.
The first borgate were built by the Fascists after having razed entire downtown neighborhoods. These urbanistic projects embodied not only an aesthetically idealized Dannunzian purpose, but were also, substantially, police operations. Large agglomerations of the Roman sub-proletariat had historically been concentrated in the ancient neighborhoods of the city center; they were “deported” to the countryside, to isolated neighborhoods, which, not surprisingly, were built to look like barracks and prisons.
In that period, the “style” of the borgata was born. The basic inspiration is “classical” and imperial. Another typical characteristic is the obsessive repetition of a single architectural motif: the same house repeated five, ten, twenty times in a row. A cluster of houses is itself repeated five, ten, twenty times. The internal courtyards are identical: wan, dusty prison yards, with rows of cement bases for laundry lines, like gallows, common lavatories and wash-houses.
The city has gradually closed in around these neighborhoods. Before the war they were in the middle of the countryside; now the city has swallowed them up, continues to swallow them up. Even so they persist, stylistically and psychologically, as “islands.”
After the first groups of the disenfranchised were deported by the Fascists came the families who had been evicted from their homes, and then the evacuees. Then people began arriving from Cassino in droves.
Naturally during the Fascist period, the war, and especially during the post-war period, crime and delinquency flourished. The “Hunchback of Quarticciolo”105 is by now legendary. The thousands upon thousands of jobs created in the building sector and the introduction of immigrants somewhat improved the level of moral and civil life. Nevertheless, it continues to be among the lowest in the country.
We recently returned to the borgata of Gordiani. It is being torn down. Where there were lines of atrociously sad, dirty, inhuman shacks there is now an expanse of reddish crushed stone. And beyond it shimmers, weirdly, the front end of the Centocelle neighborhood.
A few clusters of surviving shacks are still standing, destined to disappear without delay. Soon the plateau of Gordiani will be completely leveled, and all memory of the neighborhood will disappear.
Most of the inhabitants of these houses have been moved, after a decade of battles and hopes, to the newly built Villa Gordiani and the Villa Lancellotti on the Via Prenestina, not far from the old borgata.
I went to see them. In reality nothing has changed. Instead of the small one-story shacks with a little courtyard in front, there are brand new buildings, amid excavation sites, abandoned fields, and dumping grounds. What are the stylistic, sociological, or human criteria of these new buildings? They are the same as before. This is still a concentration camp. Two or three years from now, these walls will be peeling, the courtyards will be filthy, there will be a shortage of space. In fact there already is. There has been no social renewal, no new social elements have been introduced, no liberation has taken place. The same people were transferred en masse from an old concentration camp to a new one.
The borgate built by the Christian Democrats106 are identical to those built by the Fascists, because the relationship between the “poor” and the State remains unchanged. It is still an authoritarian, paternalistic, and profoundly inhuman relationship based on “religious” mystification.
To get an idea of what I am talking about, just go beyond Centocelle, at the end of the Via Prenestina, to the Quarticciolo, and try to maneuver your way across the chaos of streets in construction, the muddy fields and the building sites rising up in every direction, as of an Eastern city. Don’t bother going in; you know what to expect. It’s enough to peek in from the doorstep.
The first row of lots will appear before you like the front of a penitentiary. The buildings are about three or four stories high, in an indescribably sinister liquorice or antique pinkish color. You’ll see an infinite line of windows and other ornaments, not without a certain air of grandiosity, in a typical twentieth-century Imperial style.
In front of the row of lots lies a road, teeming with misery and activity, down which rolls an ancient, rickety bus. An irrigation ditch runs down this road, its edges caked with mud and garbage, its waters murky.
Beyond this ditch lie the newer lots, which were built in the last two or three years.
The architecture is the same as in the old borgata. The streets are laid down in a Roman grid, and along these streets are set the new buildings, all of them identical, in identical rows. But rather than being set parallel to the street, the buildings are diagonal, their corners lined up, so as to be better exposed to the sun—as if there were a shortage of sun in Rome. Rather than appearing classical and grandiose, the buildings seem Romantic and coy. And herein lies the single difference between the borgata of the Fascists and that of the Christian Democrats.
Vie Nuove, Rome, May 24, 1958.
104 Literally, a suburb, or a peripheral neighborhood, but without the comfortable, middle-class connotations. People who live in the “borgate” are people who have either been forced out of the city center by real estate costs or very poor people who are moving into the city from the countryside.
105 An anti-Fascist resistant and a popular hero who formed a group of bandits operating in the borgate of Rome. He was killed by the police in 1946.
106 The Christian Democratic party governed Italy from the post-war period until the early nineties.