MagazineRoma

The Rome’s marathon, the arrived to via dei fori imperiali, and the new urban ascetics's endurance

Antonio Carbone — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:46:00 +0100

Now they are all tired, wrapped in the cloak of silver. They chase one another, they hug, sharing a joy that hardly who hasn’t participated at least a half marathon can understand. It is the people of the marathoners. A strange and unusual people. The trait that distinguishes them, through which you is often able to recognize them even when wearing street clothes, is the thinness. As urban ascetics. It takes many sacrifices to achieve it.

There are days that just to buy a pair of socks, I enter one of these stores for runners that are around. I do it for then with an any excuse to be able to speak to the owners. Almost always they are former athletes who, proud, yet remain in shape. Ripetute, 4’ a chilometro. Sforzo aerobico. Solo carni bianche. Pasta in bianco e parmigiano, con olio a crudo. I throw there, casually, some expression of the kind to win their esteem. I loosen the grip only when, perhaps because they moved with compassion, giving me a pat on the shoulder, say me: "So six of us."

Only then, with those new socks in my pocket, I go away. With a smug expression. The same that I think I have now I wander among all these faces that do not even know. From some time I have started to trust only in them. On one hand, I put their and on the other the swollen faces, plastic, who always betray an excessive greed finalized even more than the accumulation, to devour everything quickly. In the bleak landscape in which we have to live, represent a new phenomenon of endurance: in group, but sometimes alone, they run in any weather. Gritting my teeth. Are capable of self-discipline that they do to fade even more virtuous priests. Not to mention the politicians. By their example reactivate the principle of respect for the rules. For the regulations. Try, before a race, even a stracittadina of seven kilometres, to approach someone, offering their a concoction to run faster. Ninety-nine center of the time, you can be sure you hear them say: " I would prefer not to."

The underground car park of Villa Borghese, the vanguard, the gelatinous substrate and the two Italie

Antonio Carbone — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 08:30:00 +0100

It’s one of those afternoons when one leaves behind the door thoughtfully. Almost just because time has granted a bright spell. The same random is the path taken: Viale Castro Pretorio over Italy, Villa Borghese. A little 'less the reason that leads me down the stairs of the underground parking. I do it in a sort of hypnosis, dream. The excuse is that I should get the car that I left there for several days but in reality is very different reason. There is almost a wish, step by step, to return back to the day when, at the opening, in November 1973, was set up inside a large exhibition, "Contemporary", organized by Achille Bonito Oliva with Graziella Lonardi.

What city was Rome in those years? It was, despite the artistic vitality - was precisely then that Christo packed two hundred meters of the Aurelian Walls - a sad city, gray? Who will have had ten, eleven years is likely that he would answer yes. "Not less of the rest of the country" would feel, perhaps, to specify those who then had already reached the age of reason. Exactly, as was Italy in those years? The unmasking of many intrigues was still far to come and the two Italie, that solar surface and the dark, and that grim underground of today is often confused in a "gelatinous substratum, were well separated. Entering a collision course only at certain points.

It is not known what led Achille Bonito Oliva and Graziella Lonardi, to the end of this parking. But you can not exclude that beyond the intent of doing amazing display in a space so unusual artists of international renown - an idea of what that event is represented can have it by visiting the MACRO via Reggio Emilia exhibition in Rome Ours was the vanguard - had, in their way, also aimed to shed light on these two Italie. I am convinced more and more not just return to the surface, searching the area above. Although, in partial confirmation of this intuition, there is only the usual bright of the grass of the great occasions and the presence, wacthful and austere, of the trees.

A short walk along the edge of the new year, the practice abandoned, the urban decay and the cheeky faces on the walls

Antonio Carbone — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 20:31:00 +0100

Plastic glasses, a few bottles of sparkling wine, several boxes of fireworks ripped. No trace of broken dishes. No one that, fallen by accident, it is just crumbled. At nine thirty in the morning around there is nobody yet. The few you see are far apart, with a dog on a leash. The first greetings I exchange on Tuscolana, at the height of Numidio Quadrato, with a Bengali, sitting next to a petrol pump. Who would, moreover, to take a walk at this hour? By this weather, to boot. It is not clear if it will hold. Anyway, I prefer not to move away from metro. If you begin to rain, I just need to make a few meters and to go down.

“They didn't shot so much last night." "For me, like all other years." It was in these terms that, once, during the first walk of the new year, we commented that remained on the streets of the fireworks. When it was not raining, there was more flavour. Like artificers, we scoured the neighborhood looking for those not exploded. With a little of reckless, we set off them, turning what was left of the fuse and then we ran away as fast as possible. At lunch, then, we followed with apprehension the usual reportages of the tv about the night before. There was always someone who had put back at least one hand.

A refrigerator, a desktop computer with its printer. They are the only waste, so-called bulky, of which someone has taken advantage of the end of the year to get rid. It's eleven o'clock, when, before the sacrament of the Church of Don Bosco, I go back. I almost feel a bit of disappointment, though the old custom of throwing something out the window, once very common, we can not say it was a great sight to see. More or less like this cheeky faces that from some days they have begun to occupy all the walls, without any regard. You can bet that will be the their selves that, once elected, they will come to talk to us about the urban decay and on the need to give a good lesson to whom smears, destroys and loots.

Purchases of Mid-August: the vu’ cumpra’ through the streets of Rome and on the beach

Antonio Carbone — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 11:05:00 +0200

400, 500, 600... how many kilometres, at a minimum, you must be away from home to be considered a foreigner? Having done in the past few hundreds too, for reasons of work, sometimes I ask myself this question. Like now that I am on the beach, just over 100 kilometres from Rome, and I can not help but dwell on the faces of the dense rank of vendors, who paraded in front of me every few minutes apart.

To reach this place, this early morning, I took the regional train that goes to Pisa. I travelled in a carriage occupied mainly by Bangladeshis still sleepy. At every station where we stopped, others have seen emerge along the escarpment, between the thick reeds, and to set out with a quick pace to reach the train. Yet even for a moment I felt a sense of insecurity, fear, danger. Feeling them even more familiar of the many home sellers, mostly Neapolitan, to which, in theory, I should feel closer, coming from the same region.

Thin. Combed, dressed always in a dignified manner. They look like eternal students. You would not say that they, with their loads yet tired, have the strength to go and pick something. On the streets of Rome, if they try to sell you just an umbrella to shelter from the sun or on the beach, a clock, they are never arrogant. They just smile at you and hardly behind their timid eyes we glimpse the shy ambiguity of who is ready to deception. For the brief moment that the meeting lasts more than a discount, you're always tempted to offer them a barter.

Paris-Rome: games of prestige

Elisa Brilli — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:53:25 +0100

Italian friends ask me about our prestige beyond the Alps... At seven o'clock in the evening in the second arrondissement, Fucxia, our chain of wine shops, is crowded. Usual queue even in front of Amorino, while the rue de Petits Champs tickles your eyes with very expensive italian products.
Shop windows apart, at the end of January Le Monde defineds us as: " Un pays immobile et divisé, alors que le reste du monde a changé”" and a few days later: " La compétitivité de l'Italie s'est effondrée depuis cinq ans." Liberation ends the analysis on our government crisis with: " Ce pays est réellement à la dérive”. It’s better not to ask about our current prestige. What about the recent past? On the 5th of February, France5 broadcasts E. Amara’s documentary on the Moro. Pieczeik, "psychological expert" sent by Carter in support of Cossiga’s secret cell, says that Moro was kept alive to take back control of the secret services and that the fiction of the negotiations was interrupted for fear that he might reveal state secrets. Cossiga, interviewed subsequently this, confirmed this and said his conscience as a statesman was clear but not catholic soul, less his soul of catholic, these issues will be solved face to face with God. French viewers were dismayed.

At seven o'clock in the evening in the second arrondissement maybe it’s better to come back window shopping. But other questions assail us from one window to another: why, with the profound crisis that France is going through, Italians are so concerned much about their prestige here while the French couldn’t care less about theirs? Why is the French image almost intact? Prestige or prestidigitation? I would say to those friends who ask that prestige is less evident in the judgment of others than in self-criticism.

The uncertain days, the exemplary Rome, the siege, the collapse of the walls and the matter of the Romanians

Federico Pace and Antonio Carbone — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 07:41:04 +0100

These are tense and uncertain days. Tuesday 30th October a woman, Giovanna Reggiani, was attacked and killed not far from the Tor di Quinto railway station. Charged with the event is a Romanian called Nicolae Mailat. The new migrants sometimes show an aggressive face. The new migrants seem uncontrollable. They also, as Italians, and like the ex-marksman of Guidonia, wound and kill.

The day after the aggression of the woman, the government passed a decree that allows expelling community citizens. Political leaders pursued each other trying to assert and defend security before anything else. It seems better to erect new walls. These constructions, after all, have for a long time guaranteed the defence of a city. As if it was a signal, in these days, Thursday night a breach opened in the aurielane walls on Viale Pretoriano just in front of Caritas. A few meters of those walls that came down were built in just four years, between 271 and 275 D.C. and they seemed even then only a symbol of the strength and unassailable force of the empire. At that time they were also places of attacks, destruction and raids. They also were incapable to defend the city.

Who is leading the siege to attack the walls of the city today? By who is brought the attack to the borders of civil society made of commitment and respect, founded on laws and duties? Which is the way to defend ourselves from those who show thier ferocious side? How can we prevent the breach that has opened reduce our society to a parody of democracy where security is preferred and sacrificed to laws and to equality? How do you keep alive a true democracy? To these difficult questions will have to be found complex answers, and not immediate and convenient solutions, in order to avoid that the city is taken by barbarians. Incapable powerful persons, greedy migrants, angry citizens as they are.

The vegetative state of trees

Antonio Carbone — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:42:04 +0200

Even trees get sick and sometimes there is no other remedy than to cut them down. As lamed horses. With the difference that in comparison with the horses, the trunks of trees remain there, for a time unpredicted, testimony of a previous life that only the habitual attendees of certain streets are able to grasp. Only for them they assume an aspect of sepulchral cippuses.

For the most they are plane trees. Probably because they are many. They were introduced in mass when Rome became the Italian capital in accordance with the taste that reigned then in other European cities. But even the pines get sick. A bit less the holm oaks. Rarely the palms. Often instead the locust trees, that apparently seem in good health, they reveal to be precarious. This happens because inside the wood tends to rot easily. They are among the trees that once cut, change more easily destination of use. As they induce who passes by distractedly to consider them a kind of trashcan for rubbish.

To see them from on above, instead, these sections of trunk give the idea of little marble quarries. The various striations of the wood, different by colour, seem stratifications of rocky materials. Others, above all those more irregular, already in some measure rotten, of extinct volcanoes. Islands of basalt just emerged from the sea. What happens under there? It becomes spontaneous to ask. You never lose hope that sooner or later from the roots send a burst capable of waking up again that mass of material without apparent life. At times this happens. And so on the side you see tillers break, exaggeratedly long and thin. It does not matter how long they last and that they never take the semblance of real and proper tree.

His Africa

Federico Pace — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:35:51 +0200

Now there is nothing to separate him from the position of Democratic Party leader. Now there is nothing to separate him from the umpteenth return to national politics. Now there is nothing to separate him from the definitive affirmation. Now there is nothing to tempt him. Now there is no identity behind which to hide. Now there is no other commitment or mission that can make him think about to leave politics and power.

What he had said once does not count any more. His vague promise does not count anymore either. That thought he had put before us to give to his profile something of sacred. That promise does not count anymore. Veltroni has always been a man with power. And now even more. For a long time he has made us believe he was Falstaff but instead none other than Hal, the friend that betrays Falstaff and abandons him to go on and be crowned Henry V. It does not matter if we prefer Falstaff. It does not matter if we prefer “wit and liberty”. Hal-EnricoV-Veltroni prefers power. We knew it.

When Albert Camus went to Brazil for a series of lectures he passed by his Africa, the land where he was born. During the night when he made a stop over at Dakar and smelt the odour of poverty and abandonment, he wrote two adjectives in his diary for that land of origin: “sad and corrupt”. Walter Veltroni has made it. The Italy that he dreams of “left and democratic” is his. Now this will be his Africa.

Anna Politkovskaja Place

Antonio Carbone — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 22:47:52 +0200

It wasn’t easy to find. But then who remembers the avenues, the places and the streets of a park? Even the local policeman who put me on the right path, made me notice that it is a simple plaque. «You can find it at the end of that path. » «At the end of the Brontë sisters avenue?» I specified. He simply nodded. He also was a little confused.

There is to say that the idea started by André Glucksmann was of another sense. In the days following the death of the Russian journalist, the French philosopher proposed to mayors of all European capitals to dedicate the roads where they have Russian embassies to her. The invitation was not accepted. Probably to avoid diplomatic incidents but also we are not in any condition to give lessons to anyone. The history for the defence of democracy is a long martyrology. A thin thread that reaches the Buddhist monks, who continue to lose their life in Burma. We know something about this with Falcone and Borsellino and others. The writer Robert Saviano is still forced to travel with an escort.

So then let’s be satisfied of an “Anna Politkovskaja place” at villa Pamphili. Running the risk that in a couple of years the few who will give an eye to this plaque, without paying attention to the date, may think that it deals with a Russian woman writer from the end of the nineteenth century. It will be a minor evil. Also because it would not make a bad impression even in the presence of a Cechov or a Tolstoj. It has shown us the true face, the Russia of Putin, like those who showed us the Russia of the Czars«I live my life and I write of what I see » says Politkovskaja in the introduction of her book. Tender and hard. This made her doubly inconvenient.

The coded confession

Federico Pace — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 08:48:30 +0200

About the streets of the city it is easy to come across graffiti, on the ground and walls. They are the amorous spray expressions. White, black or coloured. They are done with declamatory words, absolute and at times, epical. They are written nearly always by kids. At the centre of the authors thoughts there are fiancées, girlfriends, and girls just glimpsed. Or lost loves.

These spray messages are found, usually, in front of the house doors of “her”. Or close by. So the girl finds them under her nose every time she goes out. In the morning, in the afternoon. Even in the evening. She sees them with whoever she goes out with. By herself, with her mother, her friends, her new boyfriend or who knows. Which emotion can a young woman feel in the presence of that outcry of paint thrown on the door of her house?

It’s difficult to say if these spray messages are an effective way to communicate. In this case it is not important. The fact that they dirty the walls or roads is not important. While every day you hear of young women hit with violence by friends, fiancés or ex fiancés, what counts more is to understand if these graffiti are indeed the sign of a creative impulse and an amorous gesture of pure love. Or if on the contrary, it conceals instead the hidden trace of a possessive impulse. The coded confession of a dangerous and cruel possessiveness/obsessiveness.