My inclinations towards Rome are not polemical, I don't feel bitterness or disdain, because Rome is a capable circus where everything enters, it is a floating magma where everything is absolved and everything is dissolved, an exploding bubble, a city with dimensions of cynicism, wisdom, indifference that never change and lead back to the same mistakes, a metropolis that allows you to remain childish with the approval of the Church. It took 261 popes to do it. How can we expect to change it in a few centuries?. Federico Fellini, up L'Espresso of 28 March 1971
The discussion on the fate of the capital, temporarily dormant in the face of the tragedy of Covid, is reviving in view of the elections in the autumn. In public opinion there seems to be widespread awareness of the pitiful state of Rome. Until 2008, with the growing economy, the imbalances were less perceptible but, with the crisis, the public resources that up until then had supported the city have failed, growth has stopped and the lowest sections of the population have been hit the hardest. The now tangible risk is that inequalities, degrowth, maladministration pollute the deep soul of Rome, its "unique and non-reproducible entity", its image, what Walter Benjamin called the "aura" of a city. And there seems to be consensus on the idea that, beyond today's management problems (transport, waste collection, urban decorum), albeit acute due to the degradation that characterizes them and punctually noted by citizens' opinions, the crisis of the city is also the result of the lack of planning and vision on the future of Rome. Planning and vision that have been chronically absent for some time.
The contradiction between its beauty and the role of capital and the serious difficulties that the city has been experiencing for a long time, a real "Roman disease", has long attracted writers, directors, scholars, urban planners, politicians who have recounted and denounced the its chaotic disorder and unbridled speculation, the lazy nature of its population, its inadequacy to represent the country. Other authors have ventured into one pars construens and they suggested therapies. One could say that books on Rome have now become a literary genre.
So why yet another reflection on Rome? The attempt, conducted in the pages of "2021: Miracle in Rome" by adopting an agile cut but which takes into account the very abundant literature on the capital, is to offer a reflection on the long-term reasons for the city's crisis and on some possible ways to get it back to growth, as they say today, "in a fair and sustainable way". The conviction is that the lack of modernization and the absence of planning are not accidental. Rather, for a long time, Rome hasn't seemed capable of expressing forces capable of designing and realizing a project of lasting growth and balanced urban development, a "social bloc" bearer of a modernizing action. In such a framework, the city government could only implement, with rare exceptions resulting from particular circumstances of national politics, "bad policies" or in any case inadequate to the size of the problems.
But it is not only for this "structural" reason that one can wonder whether it is realistic to think of putting Rome back on a path of growth and modernization. Sometimes the historical nature of the city is evoked, so grandiose, that it would generate a sort of spell that would make it refractory to modernity. It is a Fil rouge, which could be defined as a fatalist, who has always followed studies and reflections on Rome. And there are no quotations. From Henry Adams, an American historian who visited the Eternal City just before Porta Pia: “Rome could not be introduced into a systematic scheme of evolution, orderly, bourgeois, born in Boston. No law of progress could be applied to them”, to Italian authors such as Pirandello what The late Mattia Pascal makes Anselmo Paleari express that famous judgment, quoted several times, liquidating any possible prospect of modernity for the Capital:
And it is in vain, believe me, every effort to revive it. Locked in the dream of her majestic past, she no longer wants to know about this petty life that persists in swarming around her. When a city has had a life like that of Rome, with such marked and particular characteristics, it cannot become a modern city, that is, a city like any other. Rome lies there, with its great broken heart, behind the Campidoglio.
Even the quote from Fellini reported in the exergue implicitly refers to that vision and evokes Rome's resistance to modernity, its unshakeable eternity and therefore the impossibility of judging it by common standards such as efficiency or decorum. AND Mario Praz, in his book dedicated to the Eternal City, observed how Rome, “having not been mithridatised against modern life by a progressive adaptation, succumbs". Ferrarotti, who once denounced the living conditions in the Roman suburbs with his analysis, recently confides that "only in Rome have I learned to distrust hyperactivism, I have begun to appreciate an indolence, which is neither sloth nor sloth" . A Fil rouge which in the face of the crisis of recent years seems to have regained strength. And so "the diversity of experience", "the disastrous sublime", "uniqueness" are invoked in support of the thesis that Rome must remain "semantically ephemeral", that its problems cannot be solved, rather that the degradation and contrasts can generate imagination and therefore design innovation, almost to the point of becoming a "development engine".
It is a vision that is not echoed within the pages of this book.
There is no doubt that Rome, to put it in sociological terms, has failed to regularly follow that "temporal and structural path necessary to acquire the characteristics of modern societies", which are those of the western industrialized world. Rome, if we look at the criteria normally used to measure the quality of life, has failed to become not only like Paris or London but not even like Madrid. Her story seems to keep her away from a habitat of economic and social progress. But these results they do not represent an “inescapable destiny”: rather they find foundation in the economic and social structure of Rome and in the choices made by the political actors. Of course, this structural interpretation of the lack of modernization, the impossibility for Rome to identify itself in an entrepreneurial culture, in any case raises a question as to the forces on which to rely for a brighter future for the capital. And the answer that the book offers is that to compete with the new century, to resume the path of transformation, mend the cultural, economic, social fracture between the historic core of the city and the huge, endless suburbs, and put of rationalisation, a decisive role will have to be played by public policies. Public policies that will finally have to take into account that "you don't enjoy the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but the answer it gives to your question" (Calvino, Invisible Cities).
Sometimes, in the discussion on Rome, the emphasis has been placed on the contrast between the lack of modernization and the role of representing the country, its "must be" capital. Here a second perspective opens up with which to look at the city: its relationship with the rest of the country, the possible specificity in the Roman institutions of the economy and society compared to the other large Italian cities. Does Rome really offer a distorted image of Italy? In reality, it seems difficult to deny that a modernization problem arises for all of Italy which, not by chance, has been growing less than the rest of Europe for more than twenty years. A problem that concerns the public sphere – due to the invasive and at the same time weak control institutions, due to the malfunctioning of the services, to the corruption of the administrators, to an often hostile and inefficient bureaucracy – but also the private sphere – due to the failure to respect for the territory and common goods, for tax evasion, for the lack of sensitivity for conflicts of interest; all manifestations of an insufficient diffusion of the civicness which afflicts, albeit with variable intensity, the whole national territory.
He had grasped the relationship between Rome and the rest of the country well Luigi Petroselli, the communist mayor of a very brief but happy season between the seventies and eighties, when in controversy with Alberto Moravia, author of a pamphlet highly critical of Rome, he recalled how "the monstrous and absurd imbalances of Rome and the bands of parasitism that still suffocate life have not been a residual lead ball at the foot of a country [...], but they have acted as a counterpoint and a detonator to the squandering of material, cultural and human resources, which has marked the entire development of the country”. Rome would therefore unequivocally represent Italy's weaknesses, albeit with entirely its own features, extreme if you like. The same delay in the modernization of the capital could be the emblem of a more general, controversial relationship that the country has with modernity. But beware of easy acquittals: it is the scale that is different, as in a distorting mirror national defects are returned to us to a high power. In this key, Rome can be considered a bitter and fascinating metaphor.
A deformation that can be seen in the size and rootedness of the forces that are contrary to modernization, examined in the second chapter. There is the millenary presence of the Church which with modernity… does not exactly have a fluid and transient relationship and whose influence on the city has been very strong, even if perhaps less invasive today than it was up to thirty years ago. There is building rent, the secular driving force of the Roman economy, even if today in partial retreat, a force constitutionally contrary to some typical processes of modernity such as competition, towards which, moreover, hostility is so widespread throughout the country, but elsewhere tempered by greater industrialization and the consequent need to compete internationally. There is not an active bourgeoisie, in part as in the rest of the country, but with the "aggravating circumstance" of the proximity to the national political power which exerts a call that is difficult to resist for the local ruling class with the connected typically "intermediary" activities with respect to the "entrepreneurial" ones. There is organized crime notoriously of traditional ancestry, albeit very modern in terms of means and intertwined with cultural and political kinships; also a phenomenon that does not spare the rest of the country but which in Rome has found its own configurations, some even mythologized, and has a high diffusion. Then there is a specific, idiosyncratic factor: the local character, the cultural humus, the "Roman spirit" to the extent that it is identifiable, and I believe that it still is, skeptical and not inclined to respect the common good and that in the last fifteen years it has drawn new life from the neglect, often from corruption, of local political institutions.
Urban and national policies have done little to remedy the social problems and inequities typical of a large metropolis, indeed, in some cases, such as urban planning policy, they have contributed to increasing them. Good local government has historically been an exception: nor could it be otherwise, given the difficulty of building a reformist and modernizing social bloc. National governments are also on the run who have not been able to outline and carry forward a project to enhance the political and symbolic role of the Eternal City. From this incapacity of politics, the right, traditionally rooted in the capital and notoriously hostile to modernity, continues to draw strength. The limited successes and numerous failures, especially the more recent ones, of the policy in Rome and towards Rome are examined in the third chapter.
Given these premises, the crisis was inevitable. And the forms of the crisis, the weak economy oriented towards traditional activities with low added value, social inequalities, the disaster of services, are explored in the pages of the book.
What can we expect for the near future? The two crises, that of "after 2008" and that of Covid, have impressed one rapid acceleration to the decay of the city. Nor does the imminent election of the new mayor leave room for optimism, also due to the way in which the candidates were chosen by the main political forces where how to enhance the political and symbolic value of Rome certainly did not have a primary role. Confirming the lack, on the part of the big parties, of an idea of the city that tries to outline a hypothesis for a solution to the only question that should concern them: how to get out of decadence, how to make Rome a city that is both fairer and return to growth and on which levers to operate to achieve this extraordinarily ambitious goal. Nor do we glimpse the social forces capable of supporting a project of this kind and of transferring it to the mechanisms of collective decision. The most probable scenario for the Capital appears to be the victory of that candidate able to better express, in a way that is more understandable for the electorate and more effective in the media, the strong demand for the redistribution of resources that comes from the city, severely tested over the last fifteen years .
Still, there might be some conditions for a “miraculous breakthrough” which draws leverage, at least in part, on the forces that have governed Rome for one hundred and fifty years. First, public resources could flow back in relatively copious amounts with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) and also with the 2025 Jubilee, ma a new planning in urban planning and a reinvigorated administrative capacity would be necessary for them to actually be assigned to the capital. And the Recovery, with the large "semi-public" companies that will play a fundamental role in its implementation, could bring the axis of economic power back to Rome with the related activities of professional services and finance; ma to fulfill this role, the capital must have adequate digital and mobility infrastructures. Tourism could also resume ma, considering how the tourist offer has developed in the last twenty years, not intervening to redevelop it would condemn Rome to remain on services with low added value.
The traditional levers therefore need new grafts for a reawakening of the city. And it is necessary, with a little optimism of the will, to continue rethinking Rome and outlining public policies that can mark a discontinuity, integrate the traditional engines of the Roman economy and bring about the miracle. There are three sectors to be entrusted with a recovery in development, obviously not exhaustive, and on which the reader will find a brief insight: interventions that recover at least part of the suburbs within a wider urban project, an industrial relaunch of utilities, an institution capable of aggregating the offer culture and promote it internationally. The hopes for overcoming the economic decline and social unease of Rome remain entrusted to the establishment of new "economic institutions of the Capital", under public control but with a significant private presence, which can increase the attractiveness of entrepreneurial and scientific resources and make the more livable city for all its citizens.
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To read the introduction of “2021 Miracle in Rome”, edited by Linda Lanzillotta, click here.
