Abstract
And let us dwell, now, on the expectations and illusions that a new plan always inspires.
The publication of this essential reference book in English is long overdue. Italo Insolera (1928–2012) originally provided in-depth scholarship of the history of modern Roman planning published in Italian in 1962 as Roma Moderna. Since that early text, Isolera added to and re-released fourteen subsequent editions. The author, a renowned scholar, professor (IUAV/Venice and Geneva), historian and urban planner, produced the final Italian volume with Paolo Berdini, his student, in thirty chronological chapters, plus a conclusion, which appeared in 2011 as Roma moderna. Da Napoleone I al XXI secolo. This 2018 volume, Modern Rome, made available by Cambridge Scholars for international audiences and reviewed here, was amended, translated, and edited by Lucia Bozzola, Marco Zumaglini, and Roberto Einaudi with two epilogue “sub-chapters” by Insolera collaborators Vezio De Lucia, Francesco Erbani, and Paolo Berdini.
In the troika of fundamental cultural references to the expansive modern conglomeration of the Eternal City, Insolera’s carefully researched volume sits with La Dolce Vita and Caro Diario as a reflective, complex, often ironic interpretation that genuflects to the left. Each depiction allows the viewer to know Rome in rich detail beyond stereotype from its author’s point of view. Yet unlike cinematic portrayals, Modern Rome, the book, documents the policy trajectories under administrations from the Napoleonic Papal city state built on ancient ruins, to the new Italian capital under a monarchy with a weak prime minister, to Fascism, and finally to the Republic whose post-war planning divisions have struggled amidst fluctuating coalition governments. It is a long, entangled story, and Insolera reported coherently with nuanced historic data and essential resources. This English version of his original scholarship is highly readable, if at times encumbered by disjointed street names and too many tram routes. Insolera knew Rome intimately and provided her planning history over the past two centuries while freely opining with sharp and critical insights. The key figures of authority, designers, urbanists, politicians, and teams of planning committees, exclusively male, are well identified in biographic footnotes.
The dilemma of initiating the story of Modern Rome’s urban evolution settled on the epoque in which a non-Roman, Napoleon, signed the first decree for Capital Rome in 1811. When Rome later became the official capital of the new country of Italy in 1871, the shrunken area inside ancient walls accommodated less than 300,000 citizens. It would grow exponentially over the next sixty years requiring essential plans of 1883, 1909, and 1931, which were established as what postwar planners recognize as viable and useful tools, perhaps the last of their kind. The 1942 Variant or Shadow Plan appeared before the term of the 1931 plan had run out letting Mussolini speculate, demolish, and leave lasting icons that would influence the next decades. Inevitable growth demanded new arteries and thoroughfares, methods and modes of public transportation, and enormous expansion of scaled mass housing during the twentieth century with factors relatively unique among European cities of second-wave industrial migration. Rome’s archeological foundations, surviving monuments, and ruins; the presence of the Papacy; and eventually, Fascism, distinguish the picturesque city of the Baroque in defiance of rational planning logic. It is enough to consider Insolera’s description of Rome’s futile and interminable efforts to build a metro.
Insolera’s skepticism of the efficacy of early Rome’s planning history and the fruits of so many politically convoluted trials and decrees is not a secret as he states in the Foreword: Unfortunately, the widespread belief that city planning, or even the natural complexity of the city, stems from architecture has actually turned out to be utterly misleading, at least during the last two centuries in Rome. City planning itself has disappeared, defeated and buried under tons of paperwork . . .
when “we wish the opposite were true” (3). Nonetheless, he persevered to illuminate urban Rome’s complex modern evolution through the emergence of this flawed, desired, noble, disordered, and continuously changing icon of the ancient past. In this, the resonance of the author’s true voice makes the dense volume enjoyable to read. He produced what he characterizes as a tragi-comic portrayal of unauthorized dwellings later amnestied, failed big initiatives, including the missed opportunities for major parks along the Via Appia Antica and the Roman Fora still dominated by Mussolini’s Via Foro Imperiali, and unresolved traffic infrastructure, leaving him to question whether Rome can even claim to be a modern city.
The potency of Roman politics in urban planning policy is introduced with quotations by a few of Rome’s most noted mayors: Luigi Petroselli (1981) who died in office just short of accomplishing some potentially bold initiatives, art historian Giulio Carlo Argan (1978), Anglo-Italian Ernesto Nathan (1907), and Luigi Pianciani (1873) who foreshadowed the entire century to follow when stating, “Far more than building, investors buy and sell land, while the people do not have enough houses” (1). The tragedy of speculation and allied corruption is also the story of planning in Rome, and poorly housed are its victims. Insolera’s useful description of the Roman palazzina and the role of this unique Roman building type in the expansion of housing after World War I, especially to provide for the growing middle class, which subordinated and ultimately replaced the familiar villino, explains the essential fabric and density of much of modern Rome from Monte Mario to Parioli. At the same time, the giardino dwelling type and historic villas around the center disappeared. Fascist demolition driven by aims for risanamento, or sanitation, in the center forced populations to migrate into dense borgate on the periphery, remote modern apartment blocks isolated from the center, crowded, without adequate social or hygienic services. Insolera refers to the twelve borgate built between 1924 and 1940, including Quarticciolo, Primavale, Centocelle, Prenestina, and Gordiani, as urban slums, while some more recent scholarship has revisited these neighborhoods arguing in their favor as viable social constructs with continuous occupation. INA-Casa housing complexes (1949–1963), initiated the federal program funded by the national insurance administration and the Marshall Plan, offer a bright moment in Roman residential design and construction administration. Generally, however, speculation and illegal developments in the years leading up to and following the 1965 plan have defied planning’s best efforts to mediate the demolition and construction fervor that has robbed Romans of parks and greenery, historic quarters, and effective transit. Politicians have fiddled while modern Rome has been built.
Chapter 15 recalls the planning and expanded development of the E42/EUR District originally intended to commemorate the 1922 March on Rome. Insolera recorded here the only complete, novel, and symbolic urban construction that was surprisingly continued after Mussolini’s demise and the new Republic was established. Several of the Duce’s key designers, including Marcello Piacentini, Luigi Piccinato, and Virgilio Testa, remained central figures of the post-World War II construction and planning of Rome. (Insolera and Di Majo (1986) are responsible for a volume dedicated to the building of the region: EUR and Rome from the 1930s to 2000.)
It is unfortunate that the images and maps do not match the valuable contribution to the scholarship of modern Rome. If for historic reasons the current editors chose to keep the fifty-seven black and white plates located at the center of the book, they could have linked them to text where each could then serve to illustrate a description or an argument. As primarily aerial views, they may be historic records, but remain inconsequential. The fold-out colored maps following the index are also not cited in the text and are an even greater delusion. The dense narrative and descriptions of Roman planning call out for orienting graphics that can be read spatially. It is an odd choice to use imprecise colored blobs on the Nolli map of 1748 to describe urban zones during 1800–1870. The subsequent eight fold-out maps in gray linework, gold or tan fields, and black text are too vague to provide visual comprehension. With current GIS mapping tools and exemplary graphics available, the editors have missed an opportunity to inform the reader, who is served by having Google maps handy on a tablet or computer while reading the volume.
In their conclusion, Insolera and Berdini express optimism in the twenty-first-century demographics of “Multi-Ethnic Rome.” Noting that Rome has been a city of immigrants characterized by many ethnicities, faiths, and cultures for all of its long history as a civilization justifies its current growth by accretion. Due to a declining birthrate, Rome’s augmented population is primarily through diverse immigration reinforcing the fact that the Capital still gathers all roads. This is a most humanizing catalyst for consideration. The influx to Rome is largely young and educated, and newcomers contribute to the livelihood of the metropolis. The badanti, or caregivers, from Eastern Europe and the Pacific Islands fulfill essential roles and exemplify ways in which affordable labor is provided by stranieri or foreigners. Students, scholars, international academies, global agencies, like the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, and ex-patriots who call Rome home for a prolonged period also contribute to the economy and multi-cultural environment in the arts, humanities, and sciences. These reflections on Global Rome could not be more timely.
Finally, there remains some hope that Carlo Fea’s nineteenth-century vision championed by Mayor Petroselli in the 1970s for a major park on the Via Appia Antica may yet come to fruition. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s portrayal of Rome’s defeated extremities has given way to an even more centralized, decadent and apt nostalgia for La Grande Bellezza, the masterpiece of cinema by Paolo Sorrentino that won the 2014 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. As cinema, it pairs perfectly with Insolera’s vision of this Modern Rome. The Grand Rome of Sorrentino updates Fellini’s portrayal of the Eternal City to capture the zeitgeist of decadence and display witnessed by an elite class with time on its hands. His Via Veneto is an empty, gloomy scene inhabited by an anonymous Islamic couple eating in silence amid strip clubs, while ancient humanism and the genuine sacred, the one who holds the keys to Rome’s true beauty, is ignored in plain sight.