You’ve seen them in The Roof, by De Sica and in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, as well as in the various minor products of Neo-realism. There is no one in Italy who does not have at least a vague picture in his mind of the shantytowns around Rome.
But it’s always the same: Italian culture in this last decade has been anything but realist, except in the specialized fields of the essay and investigative reporting, inspired by Marxist thought. This realism has only indirectly filtered into the artistic genres: movies, novels, and poetry.
In so doing, it has been mixed with other different, sometimes opposite cultural elements, thus undergoing an internal transformation. In the case of De Sica, it has been combined with a pre-Fascist humanitarian socialism. In Visconti, with a formalism which Gramsci would describe as “cosmopolitical,” in Fellini, with a creational, or para-religious realism.
The fact remains that the shantytowns one sees in most more or less courageous Italian films are not the same as the real shantytowns.
In fact, I don’t think that any writer or director would have the courage to fully represent this reality. He would find it too ugly, to inconceivable, and thus would be afraid of dealing with this “particular,” or marginal, specific phenomenon. Certain low points of humanity seem impossible to treat in art; apparently certain psychological deviations resulting from abject social surroundings cannot be represented.
The bourgeois public would remain unconvinced by such a representation; critics would treat it with facile irony, perhaps attributing cruelty or psychological degeneration to the person who would treat such subjects openly and without hypocrisy.
We are talking about shantytowns after all, a form of habitation typical of prehistoric peoples. Ethnologists recognize the problem, the difficulty of conceiving an irrational state within a rational state in such a way that it does not seem gratuitous and schematic.
We are not dealing with the relationship between history and prehistory. Even so, the difference in cultural and social level between people who live in homes and those who live in shantytowns is determinant. Most of the psychological and social behaviors of those who live in shantytowns, in other words those who live with one foot in prehistory and one foot in the present, are irreducible.
Of course this argument does not apply to those who are forced to live there by external, temporary circumstances. These are the most painful cases, because it amounts to a true sentence. But for those who live in these shantytowns from birth, or by predestination (mostly people from the South, from desolate villages in Calabria, Lucania, Abruzzi), this argument is completely valid. These people are a true manifestation of the sub-proletariat, rendered more complex by the mixing together of the primitive state of life in poor regions with the semi-illegality and petty crime which is typical of Rome, as well as the general moral tone absorbed from the radio, newspapers, etc.
These slums are filled with illness, violence, crime, and prostitution. And these words can only abstractly suggest the human condition that exists there.
In Rome, there are dozens of these shantytowns. They crouch in fields and irrigation ditches in the cracks of the city; they extend along embankments and railway ditches, gripping the walls of the aqueducts for miles and miles.
One of these slums is called “Il Mandrione.” At the end of the Via Casilina, just before the Quadraro neighborhood, there is an aqueduct; a road passes through the arches. To the left stands the ruin of a Baroque gate and a beautiful fountain. If you climb up, you enter a dark passage. To one side lies the huge wall of the aqueduct, and to the other, a rail line, lined with fetid ditches and piles of garbage.
There is a shantytown built along the wall. Gypsies live in the first section; then further down, under the second arch, embedded between two piles of ruins, there is a real village.
These are not human habitations lined up in the mud; they are animal dens, kennels. They are built out of a few rotten boards, peeling walls, scrap metal, and wax paper. In the place of a door, there is often a filthy curtain. Through the tiny windows, one can see the interiors, the two boards on which five or six people sleep, a chair, a few boxes. Mud seeps into the house. Even during the day, prostitutes stand in front of the doors to their hovels. A few motorcycles and cars of young men come, dragging in the mud. The mothers angrily call their daughters out to work.
A little door opens, a prostitute pours out the water from her chamber pot among the little children playing in the street, and a customer emerges. Old ladies call out like barking dogs. And then, all of a sudden, they begin to cackle as they see a cripple dragging himself out of his lair, carved into the wall of the aqueduct.
A group of adolescents watches the scene from a distance, with a thuggish, threatening air. Some of them play under the railway line, surrounded by filth and garbage. They are so focused on their card game that they do not notice anything around them, and play for hours and hours.
By the age of sixteen they often begin to work as pimps. I know one who, at sixteen, already had two women working for him….
The repressive techniques employed by chief of police Marzano have eliminated some of the “color” from these areas, but it is clear to me that this is not the best way to solve these problems. And perhaps no one knows or is able to solve them through official methods and instruments. Even if you gave these prostitutes and exploiters and other poverty-stricken inhabitants an honest job and a home, it probably would not solve the problem. Their psychology has reached a pathological level. Perhaps, after all, a solution might be the rehabilitation of the psychology of these people through religion, but no one has tried it. Politically, these tens of thousands of unfortunate souls belong to the category of the proletariat. And on the other hand, how could one honestly tantalize these people with the notion of hope?
I remember one day, driving by the Mandrione shantytown with two friends from Bologna. They were horrified at the sight of a group of children, between the ages of two and four or five, playing in the mud in front of their hovels. They were dressed in rags, one of them wearing a little animal skin that he had found who knows where, like a savage. They ran to and fro, without even the sense of order imposed by a game. They moved around as if blind in those few square feet where they had been born and where they had always lived, knowing only the shack where they slept and the two feet of mud where they played. As they saw us drive by, a little boy, well built despite his tender age—he must have been two or three—put his little grubby hand to his mouth, and happily and affectionately, on his own initiative, blew us a kiss….
The pure vitality which is at the core of these souls is the combination of evil in its purest form and good in its purest form, violence and goodness, depravity and innocence, despite everything. And for this reason something can, and must, be done for them.
Vie Nuove, Rome, May 24, 1958.