Of Efficient Trains and Ugly Architecture

I decided to give my feet a day of rest today. Today is the last of the sunny days for the foreseeable future. I did get out and walk around the neighborhood - there's a wonderful permanent street market across from the Motherhouse - everything from butcher shops and green markets to household items...and even shoes. The neighborhood contained a number of green markets (in addition to the typical "super mercado") - a feature I haven't seen since I left NYC in 1981. While we have been doing a great deal of walking, Rome is not an easy city to walk about. The sidewalks are an afterthought, installed in many places centuries after the street was built and are typically narrow and uneven. Still the brief walkabout I did this morning reminded me of all the walking I used to do in NYC. Since this was "a day of rest" for me, I will take the time in this post to comment on Rome as a city (as opposed to "Rome as the center of the Catholic Church" or "Rome as a tourist attraction"). First, and most distressingly, it is a city covered in graffiti (with the exception of high end neighborhoods like those between the Piazza del Popolo and the Spanish Steps)...everywhere...even on the walls surrounding the Vatican (not, as you might imagine inside the walls of the Vatican). There doesn't appear to be any civic attempt at abatement - as one Brother said to me when I asked about the ubiquitous defacement of buildings, sidewalks, and walls: "This is Rome; people are still going to come here." The point, unfortunately, is a good one. Our American need for tidiness is no match for a municipality that has been around for thousands of years. To appreciate this point, I only need to be reminded of two things: first – that graffiti is as old as the Coliseum; second that the word graffiti is Italian in origin. I suppose that a practice as old as this, with a term coined by a language native to Rome means that this visitor is out of step with a world governed by a different set of values. The other thing that I found striking about our many walks about the city of Rome is that, outside of the neighborhoods surrounding the different monuments to past historical events, Rome is a city of apartment buildings – badly designed apartment buildings. I suppose, in one sense, that’s why – like NYC – the transportation system is so dependent upon trains and buses. And, while NYC has its own share of badly designed apartment buildings, on the whole, they are not nearly as brutally ugly as they are in Rome. The neighborhood around the Motherhouse is illustrative of this larger point. One can look in any direction and find one’s view blocked by four or five story buildings (by law, no building in Rome can exceed the height of Saint Peter’s Basilica) crammed next to each other and containing quite functional but aesthetically ugly apartments. This is true of every neighborhood beyond a tourist attraction. This isn’t to say that the neighborhoods associated with tourist attractions are shaped by a Disneyesque attempt at recreating the past – rather these buildings are the past and reflect the elegant design principles of a different era. Mussolini may have been successful in making the trains run on time, but his impact on urban architecture has been altogether less savory.