OBERTO GILI
ON MOST MORNINGS, THE CAMPO DE’ FIORI COMES AWAKE TO the shuffle of the fruit, spice, and vegetable merchants setting up open-air stalls under ranks of white umbrellas and the gloomy gaze of Giordano Bruno. Bruno, the Renaissance friar-philosopher-cosmologist, was burned at the stake in the campo in 1600, a heretic according to the Roman Inquisition. Now a martyr to science, he has been memorialized in the middle of the square with a somber monument by Ettore Ferrari, the nineteenth-century sculptor. It is only a little bit of a stretch to see the blessed Bruno in the busy market as a metaphor for Rome’s long-standing church-state standoff, as well as speaking to the heterogeneous and serendipitous quality of public life in a great square. The campo is common ground.
What do we mean by a public square? For starters, it is rarely square, like the Place des Vosges in Paris, a Platonic version of the genre. It may be a quadrangle or rectangle or circle or pretty much any other shape, and it can be open or closed. It might even be a park, like Washington Square or Charlotte Square in Edinburgh, but if so, it tends to be a park through which people pass, going from one place to another, not simply a retreat. A square is porous, balancing its porousness with some focal point, like a fountain or a reliable patch of sun with some benches that marks a break from the cars and streets and invites people to stop, look, exhale, find one another. People escape the city by retreating into Central Park or the Tiergarten in Berlin or the Buen Retiro in Madrid. A square may be a haunting and magical place when empty, like a ghost-lighted theater. But it is often less a retreat than a magnet or a pause or a perch in the midst of things.
It may be dominated by a single great building, like St. Peter’s, but the physical virtue of occupying a square is rarely about any one building; its beauty derives from the nature of the void between buildings: the harmony of vertical and horizontal elements, architecture with open space, ground and sky, human scale. The oval arcade enclosing the square of St. Peter’s embraces visitors and brings down to a more human scale the heroic space of the piazza. Designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, it is a landmark of urban architecture. Even so, it’s not really a square like the Place des Vosges or the Campo de’ Fiori; it’s a ceremonial place. Red Square, as the crossroads of central Moscow, is often bustling, and this energy keeps it from feeling entirely inhuman. Mobs of people pass through and congregate in it, but it is, at heart, a parade ground.
The campo is a more humane and inviting square because it is down to earth, an urban accident, a long, lopsided opening among crowded medieval streets south of the Piazza Navona, which, by contrast, is a sublime historic space and also a great square, with a more formal layout, a distended oval, derived from its roots as the site of the first-century circus of Domitian. Chariots raced and gladiators clashed there. By the Middle Ages, the piazza had become a marketplace and received one of the fanciest makeovers in history when, during the seventeenth century, both Bernini and Francesco Borromini added churches and fountains that define the glory of the High Baroque. These sorts of monuments are missing from the campo, whose buildings are mostly beside the point. One tends not to notice them, what with everything going on there.
That’s because a square is also an organism, not just a work of art and architecture. “Being part of a living organism of a city with its changing socioeconomic and technical conditions, a square is never completed,” as Paul Zucker wrote half a century ago in Town and Square: From the Agora to the Village Green. “The square dictates the flux of life not only within its own confines but also through the adjacent streets for which it forms a quasi estuary. This accent in space may make itself felt some blocks in advance—an experience shared by everyone who has ever driven a car into an unfamiliar town.” That’s the case in the campo. By early afternoon, its market stalls have been folded up; the sweepers and garbage trucks are clearing the trash, and tourists are digging into their plates of spaghetti carbonara at the fixed-price restaurants that face Bruno’s monument. As they do, Fabrizio Zianchi, the former-hotelier-from-Brazil-turned-Roman-newsagent, who oversees the Collyer brothers–like news kiosk at the square’s north end, slips away for a quick siesta. Then, with early evening, he and the campo are back in business, the square now packed with mobs of flirting teenagers; kids toting cups of gelato; florists, the original merchants in the square, selling roses; and dawdling office workers grabbing a Campari or two before heading home for dinner. The crowd spills onto the three short streets that link the campo to the Piazza Farnese, a square Michelangelo conceived to be as stately as the campo is informal. Michelangelo’s original idea was that the campo should become a kind of antechamber for the piazza, the first in a sequence of public spaces leading to the Tiber. His plan was never realized, but now campo and piazza are linked like yin and yang by a river of foot traffic. For years I have frequented a café where the Via dei Baullari, one of those small streets, meets the piazza facing Michelangelo’s grand, top-heavy Palazzo Farnese and the twin fountains made from immense basins of Egyptian granite, hauled from the Baths of Caracalla. You can glimpse the campo, or part of it, from the café, so the spot gives the feel of being in the middle of things. In the morning, I stand at the café’s metal bar and throw back coffee and a cornetto alongside Italians who stop in before speeding off to work; at sunset, I sometimes find a table outside with the tourists to watch the passing circus.
Feeling in the middle of things, at the place to and from which streets flow, where people come not to escape the city but to be inside it: This is usually what defines a successful square. It is a space around which the rest of a neighborhood or town or city tends to be organized. A square may be a gift of public beauty. It may have the exquisite proportions of Michelangelo’s oval, domed Campidoglio, a dozen minutes’ walk from the Campo de’ Fiori; or of Bedford Square in London, a rectangular Georgian gem with its elliptical garden and symmetrical terrace houses of black masonry and polished hardware. It may have great sculptures. Bernini’s, in the Piazza Navona, are spectacles of marble and water, all miraculous stone and sparkling light on splashing pools, celebrating the world’s different continents, the dominion of papal Rome, and the virtuosity of a singular sculptor. But a square’s physical satisfaction accrues from the mix of light, air, sky, benches or other places to sit, and maybe trees for shade—and of course from the presence of other people. The Campo de’ Fiori was paved during the fifteenth century with Sampietrini, simple, rough black stones named after the rock on which St. Peter was presumed to have built his church. This isn’t a site of marble and glamour. The square is a treasure precisely because it doesn’t masquerade as an outdoor museum. It’s a living place, jammed with people, changeable, democratic, urbane.
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HAPPENS TO BE THE FIRST URBAN century in human history, the first time more people on the planet live in cities than don’t. Experts project some 75 percent of the global population will be city dwellers by 2050. Dozens of new cities are springing up in Asia, some from mass relocation programs that have cleared vast swaths of the Chinese countryside. Much of the growth is chaotic, badly planned and informal. Meanwhile, volatile gas prices and climate change have made suburban life costlier and the benefits of a diminished carbon footprint clearer. In the United States, growing numbers of university graduates and empty-nesters are rejuvenating downtowns. Since the late 1990s, the share of automobile miles driven by twentysomethings in America has fallen from 20.8 to 13.7 percent. The number of nineteen-year-olds opting out of driver’s licenses has tripled since the 1970s from 8 to 23 percent. Americans are still a long way from regarding cars as a luxury or superfluous. Electric, self-driving vehicles may revolutionize transportation. But a larger portion of the U.S. population is moving downtown, where deindustrialization, plummeting crime rates, and an increasing population of singles and smaller families have reshaped countless formerly desolate urban neighborhoods.
People are moving downtown for the pleasures and benefits of cultural exchange, walkable streets, parks, and public squares. Squares have defined urban living since the dawn of democracy, from which they are inseparable. From the start, the public square has been synonymous with a society that acknowledges public life and a life in public, which is to say a society distinguishing the individual from the state. There were, strictly speaking, no public squares in ancient Egypt or India or Mesopotamia. There were courts outside temples and royal houses, and some wide processional streets. Only after around 500 B.C. did squares develop. In ancient Greek, the word “agora” is hard to translate. In Homer it implied a “gathering” or “assembly”; by the time of Thucydides it had come to connote the public center of a city, the place around which the rest of the city was arranged, where business and politics were conducted in public—the place without which Greeks did not really regard a town or city as a town or city at all; rather, it was, as Pausanias, the second-century writer roughly put it, a sorry assortment of houses and ancient shrines.
The agora announced the town as a polis. Agoras grew in significance during the Classical and Hellenistic years because they were emblems of democracy, physical expressions of civic order and life, with their temples and fishmongers and bankers at money-changing tables and merchants selling oil and wine and pottery. Stoas, or colonnades, surrounded the typical agora, and sometimes trees provided shade. People who didn’t like cities, and disliked democracy in its messiness (Aristotle among them), complained that agoras mixed religious and sacrilegious life, commerce, politics, and theater. But of course that was also their attraction and significance. The agora symbolized civil justice. Even as government moved indoors and the agora evolved over time into the Roman forum, a grander, more formal place, the notion of the public square as the soul of urban life remained critical to the self-identity of the state.
To skip ahead a couple of millennia, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the now failed Egyptian revolution, early in 2011, centered around Tahrir Square, or that the Occupy Movement later that same year, partly inspired by the Arab Spring, expressed itself by taking over squares like Taksim in Istanbul, the Plaça de Catalunya in Barcelona, and Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. And I don’t think it’s coincidental that the strangers who came together at Zuccotti, Taksim, and Tahrir all formed pop-up towns on these sites, producing in bite-size form (at least temporarily) what they imagined to be the outlines of a better city, with distinct spaces designated for legal services, libraries, medical stations, media centers, kitchens serving free food, and general stores handing out free clothing. Aristotle talked about an ideal polis, extending the distance of a herald’s cry, a civic space not so large that people could no longer communicate face-to-face. In Zuccotti Park, a contained space only a block long and wide, the police allowed protesters, who were prevented from using loudspeakers, to address the crowd by repeating phrase by phrase, like a mass game of telephone, what public speakers said, so that everyone, as it were, spoke in one voice. Zuccotti became a physical manifestation of democratic ideals embedded, since the days of the agora, in the very notion of a public square.
So, in fact, a successful square is not just about light, air, proportion, and people. It must also give form to some shared notion of civic identity. That is what squares have done in French and Italian towns for centuries. In 2009 the Italian city of L’Aquila suffered a terrible earthquake. The entire historic center, not a must-see in Fodor’s but dignified and handsome, was damaged and shuttered. I went the day after the quake and have returned several times since. L’Aquila is a heartbreaker. Due partly to corruption, to incompetence, and to a failure to recognize Italy’s own great urban tradition, the Italian government pretty much threw up its hands and abandoned the place. Vast public resources were squandered creating so-called new towns, faceless housing projects with no amenities, no public spaces, shops, or transport, on the fringes of the city, along an exurban nowhere sprawl of highways. Supposedly temporary homes for displaced l’Aquilans, these new towns inevitably became permanent places to dump the elderly and local families cut off from daily life as they knew it, meaning the life of the city’s streets and plazas. L’Aquila was its street life and network of charming public squares, a working city of some seventy-five thousand that took pride in its lovely Baroque churches, modern architecture, university, and families with local roots dating back to the Middle Ages. What needed to be saved were places like the central square outside the Duomo, a sloping piazza with a fountain where one morning I bumped into Antonio Antonacci and his friends standing amid scaffolding and rubble. Antonacci is a retired lawyer. Like many others, he was displaced by the quake and had to move in with his children an hour away, but he felt lonely and so was driven by his family every week into the city to meet old friends also driven there by their families—and the men would hang out in the now mostly empty public square outside the Duomo, because to them the square, even ruined, was L’Aquila, and there was nothing to replace it. “It’s the only real home we have,” Antonacci told me.
Aquila, Piazza del Duomo
I grew up in Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs’s old neighborhood, where Washington Square Park was my version of Antonacci’s Duomo square, the place where I met friends, cooled off in the fountain, played catch with my dad, and people-watched. It was the heart of what was then a scruffier but more venturesome neighborhood than today’s Village. The city’s urban planning czar Robert Moses had wanted to drive a highway straight through the middle of Washington Square. That the Village has become one of the most desirable and expensive places in the world is in no small measure due to Moses’s failure and the park’s survival. The good life, wrote the other great New York urban writer of Jacobs’s era, Lewis Mumford, involves more than shared prosperity; it entails what Mumford described as an almost religious refashioning of values based on an ecological view of the city. Seen whole, in all its variety and interconnectedness, urban health is expressed physically in a natural configuration of built forms across the city. The art of architecture requires not just making attractive buildings but providing citizens with generous, creative, open, inviting public spaces. One of the basic truths of urban life turns out to be that there’s a nearly insatiable demand for such places. Under Michael Bloomberg’s administration, New York City inaugurated a program to convert streets across the five boroughs into plazas and squares. Making Times Square into a pedestrian mall was the program’s headliner. But the mayor’s office invited communities everywhere to suggest disused traffic triangles, parking lots, and other forlorn sites in far-flung areas that might also be reimagined. Dozens of new public spaces were proposed. The city carted in some potted trees, benches, chairs, and tables, and voilà, a new square was created. Some of these made an immediate difference in reducing crime, boosting local commerce, and improving street life.
ALO CEBALLOS/Getty Images, Washington Square Park, New York City
But the big news was just how much people craved public squares. Madison Square Park, lately renovated and one of the loveliest parks in New York City, faces the Flatiron Building, where Fifth Avenue and Broadway cross. The two avenues created for years what was the widest and most unmanageable street crossing in Manhattan. The Bloomberg administration’s idea was to turn the middle of that street into a new public square. One day I ran across Michael Bierut, whose design firm, Pentagram, faces the site, and he told me he had thought the square was a crazy plan when he first heard about it. Who in the world would sit in the middle of the street, he wondered, when you had one of the most beautiful parks in the city right there?
“Was I wrong,” Michael recalled, seeing the square mobbed, with its café tables and umbrellas scattered where trucks had rumbled down Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The new square instantly became one of the most successful public spaces in the city, with people toting prosciutto sandwiches out of Eataly, the nearby Italian food market, and Shake Shack burgers out of the park just to sit in the middle of traffic—because from there you can see the Flatiron Building one way and the Empire State Building the other, but also for the reason people gravitate to Trafalgar Square in London or the Piazza della Signoria in Florence as opposed to Hampstead Heath or the Boboli Gardens: to be in the middle of things. As retreats, parks give us room to breathe and feel alone. Squares reaffirm our commonality, our shared sense of place, and our desire to be included. “It’s why we congregate near the kitchen at a dinner party instead of in the living room,” is how Andy Wiley-Schwartz, who directed the plaza program during the Bloomberg administration, described to me the attraction of the square. “That’s where you see people coming and going to the fridge to grab a beer and watch stuff happen.”
This impulse to watch stuff happen is universal. I recently visited a refugee camp in the southern West Bank called Fawwar. There, a Palestinian architect, Sandi Hilal, worked with residents of the camp to create a public square, something virtually unheard of in such places. For Palestinian refugees, the creation of any urban amenity, by implying normalcy and permanence, undermines their fundamental self-image, even after several generations have passed, as temporary occupants of the camps, preserving the right of return to Israel. Moreover, in refugee camps, public and private do not really exist as they do elsewhere. There is, strictly speaking, no private property in the camps. Refugees do not own their homes. Streets are not municipal properties, as they are in cities, because refugees are not citizens of their host countries, and the camp is not really a city. The legal notion of a refugee camp, according to the United Nations, is a temporary site for displaced, stateless individuals, not a civic body. So there is no municipality in Fawwar, just a UN relief agency whose focus is on emergency services. That’s whom residents entreat when the lights go out or the garbage isn’t picked up, unless they want to deal with the problem themselves. Concepts like inside and outside are blurred in a place where there is no private property. A mother doesn’t always wear the veil in Fawwar, whether she’s at home or out on the street, because the whole place is, in a sense, her home; but she will put it on when she leaves the camp, because that is outside.
In other words, there is a powerful sense of community. And some years ago, Hilal—who then headed the Camp Improvement Unit in the West Bank for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, along with her husband, Alessandro Petti, an Italian architect—began a conversation with Fawwar residents about creating a public square. The residents, especially the men, were immediately suspicious, not just about normalizing the camp but about creating any space where men and women might come together in public. Fawwar was established in 1950. It’s under a quarter of a square mile, just south of Hebron, crammed with nearly seven thousand people, many the descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948. “I feel at home here,” said one middle-aged resident who was born and reared in the camp. “I want the right of return so I can decide for myself if I want to live here. It’s a matter of freedom, choosing where you live.” That sounded provocative coming from a Palestinian refugee—questioning an age-old strategy of self-deprivation, and reframing the right of return as something other than simply waiting to reclaim ancestral land, something that had more to do with freedom of choice about one’s home.
“It’s an architectural issue, in one respect,” is how Sandi Hilal put it. What she meant about it being an architectural issue was that identity in the West Bank (although not only there) is invariably tied up with notions of belonging and expressed through architecture and public spaces like squares. Hilal showed me the square she’d designed. She said that pushback was initially fierce. “When we merely mentioned the word ‘plaza,’ people in the camp freaked out,” she remembered. But a counterargument gradually took hold, which entailed abandoning what Hilal called “the strategy of convincing the whole world of the refugees’ misery through their architectural misery.” Hilal focused on women, young and old. At first they didn’t want to oppose the men who were against it. But they feared, in such a conservative enclave, that if the square were built, men would simply take it over, and that if women did try to use it, they would feel too exposed in an open space. They longed for someplace to gather outdoors with a screen or enclosure.
So the challenge became: How could a space be made open—so that men, women, and children might be able to gather together—while also allowing the women some privacy? It was decided that a low wall should surround the square, which was about seventy-five hundred square feet where there had been three disused shelters from the 1950s. The wall created a kind of house without a roof, a space at once open and contained. The architects interviewed residents whose homes faced the site, and negotiated with each one separately on the permeability of the wall in front of their houses. What resulted is a dusty, L-shaped, sun-bleached place, not much bigger than a pocket park, made of limestone and concrete, shoehorned into a warren of concrete and cinder-block houses—which has stirred serious debates among Palestinians about the role of women and the right of return. Its very existence has changed life and thinking in the camp.
The square has given children a place to play other than in crowded streets. Families have begun to use the space as a gathering spot. Young couples are getting married in the square. Mothers who rarely felt free to leave their homes to socialize in public now meet there twice a week to talk, study a little English, and weave, selling what they make in the square, an enterprise that is entirely new for women in the community and that one of the mothers told me “gives us self-esteem and a sense of worth, like the men have.”
“For me,” another mother said, “the radical change is that men here now look at women in a public square as a normal phenomenon. I can bring my kids. I can meet my friends here. We are in our homes all the time. We need to get out. We want to be free. Here, in the public square, we feel free.”
HER REMARK PUT ME IN MIND OF A MOST PERFECT SQUARE. Some years ago, I moved to Berlin with my wife and two sons in order to start a newspaper column on cultural and social affairs across Europe and elsewhere. We settled into an apartment on a quiet street in the west. We soon discovered Ludwigkirchplatz, a square, two blocks away. It unfolded at the rear of a neo-Gothic redbrick church from the 1890s, St. Ludwig’s, one of the few freestanding churches in Berlin. Several streets converged from different angles onto the square, which used to be the center of Wilmersdorf, a leafy cobblestoned quarter whose roots go back at least to the thirteenth century. Georg Grosz and Heinrich Mann once lived not far from our apartment. Not long ago, Wilmersdorf was subsumed by Berlin administrators into a larger borough, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, which includes the Ku’Damm, West Berlin’s faded but undaunted version of Broadway or Paris’s Champs-Élysées, with its glossy auto dealerships and sprawling department stores. Ludwigkirchplatz is off the beaten path. If several roads lead to it straight from the Ku’damm, they’re quiet, and you can still come upon the square as if upon a clearing in the woods. These are slumbering streets of stucco, stone, and concrete apartment blocks with funny little shops selling belly-dancing supplies, gay sex toys, Cuban cigars, and German wine. The square announces itself gradually, from a distance, with the sound of children playing and church bells.
It’s not quite an hourglass shape, paved in patterned stones and shaded by rows of linden trees, with café tables spilling from bars facing the square. A sandy playground squats below the bellowing apse of the church. A raised semicircle of benches looks back toward the café tables and onto a pair of slightly tilted concrete Ping-Pong tables, which do a brisk business in warm weather. A plaza between the café tables and the Ping-Pong tables is the square’s main stage, where skateboarders vie with toddlers, dog walkers, young mothers pushing high-priced strollers, and Wilmersdorf widows, the last generation of war survivors, not unlike the Italian matrons whom I recall from my childhood in the Village, and similarly disapproving.
Someday we will lose all this and return home, I told myself whenever I arrived in that beautiful square under the towering church steeple and settled onto the benches beside the playground, where our children loved to play. The square was a home, drawing us daily. With the usual mix of sadness and pride, I watched our older son, just eight when we moved, grow up game by game, learning to play Ping-Pong on the lopsided tables; I watched our younger boy learn to walk in the sandbox near the swings. In December, when the square was silent and briefly taken over by Turkish immigrants selling Christmas trees, we lugged our tree to our apartment after a heavy German lunch in an old corner bar that had an especially lovely view of the slumbering playground and barren branches through steam-fogged windows.
Spring arrived by fiat, as soon as we could clear the snow from the Ping-Pong tables. Wilmersdorfers desperate for winter to end were there, too, wrapped in blankets, shivering at the outdoor café tables facing the square. If a polis is measured by the length of a herald’s cry, a parish extends the distance of a church bell’s ring, and the bells of St. Ludwig’s, while deafening in the square, filtered through the surrounding streets, binding the neighborhood together.
On our final day before moving back to New York, one of those cruelly perfect, sun-kissed summer Sundays in Berlin, my older son and I returned to the square for a few last games. The square was packed with newly arrived Russian émigrés and with children carrying ice cream cones from the Italian gelateria facing the playground. “Everything is as it should be,” Nabokov once wrote. “Nothing will ever change, no one will ever die.” The smell of fresh bread wafted from an organic bakery, just off the square, mixing with the perfume of blooming lindens. Skateboards rattled over the stone plaza. The bells tolled for what seemed like an hour that afternoon. We played game after game, vainly hoping to slow time.
The perfect square, it turns out, is also a state of mind.
MATTHEW PILLSBURY
Fausto in Washington Square Park, Washington Square, New York City, courtesy Benrubi Gallery, New York
OBERTO GILI