NYT: Roma si modernizza, ma il passsato è a pezzi
mercoledì, 7 Luglio, 2010Dal New York Times del 7.7.2010:
Abroad
As Rome Modernizes, Its Past Quietly Crumbles

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: July 6, 2010
Multimedia
Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times
Zaha Hadid. More Photos »
Collapses this spring at a couple of ancient sites here caused weary archaeologists to warn, yet again, about other imminent calamities threatening Rome’s precarious architectural birthright.
Meanwhile, the smart set went gaga when an ostentatious national museum for contemporary art, Maxxi, opened recently, along with an expansion to the city-run new-art museum, Macro. That was just after Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, convened a conference for planners and architects to mull a bid for the 2020 Olympics as an incentive to update Italy’s capital. Contemporary architecture now promises to be the engine and symbol of a new creative identity for Rome that, if development is done right for a change, would complement the city’s glorious past.
“What does Rome want to be when it grows up?” is how Richard Burdett, a planner from London with Italian roots, put the situation the other day. He meant the situation of Rome at a crossroads, struggling ahead, falling behind.
Change is never easy here. When a museum designed by Richard Meier, a glass and marble building to house the Ara Pacis, opened a few years ago, Romans howled. But then, it resembles a clunky, fascist mausoleum. Maxxi, whose style presents a whole other set of problems, has fared much better in terms of public approval, attracting some 74,000 visitors in its first month and accelerating talk by leaders like Mr. Alemanno about Rome in the 21st century.
But it’s one thing for politicians to support a new headline-grabbing museum. The art crowd rolls into town, bestows its blessing, then rolls out. It’s another to take on grittier challenges like immigration, transportation and sprawl.
Even culture: a nation whose identity and fiscal survival rests on it now devotes .21 percent of its state budget (and that figure has been dropping), which is about one-fifth of the percentage that France devotes, to theater, film, exhibitions, music and museums, not to mention the upkeep of all those thousands of historical sites for which there is still no master conservation plan.
And there’s nothing close to a thought-out approach to shaping this city’s new identity, either, just a burst of mixed architecture creating facts on the ground and a fresh hunger for something better. The problems facing Rome are not going to be solved by a few big stars designing buildings but by a larger effort to rethink a city that has swiftly grown to 3.7 million inhabitants, almost all of them outside the historic center, where its past is crumbling.
How to balance old and new? It’s a familiar quandary. The Roman architect Massimiliano Fuksas is now conceiving an immense congress center on a highway built by Mussolini to connect center and sea. To one side of that center, the Luigi Pigorini Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography, a 1930s glory of limestone, stained glass, light and air, epitomizes the modernizing aspirations of an earlier day.
To the other side, new apartment blocks are to be designed by Renzo Piano, whose Parco della Musica performing arts complex, inoffensive and pragmatic, opened a few years ago just outside the city center, to general satisfaction.
This area where the Pigorini is, by contrast, never took off as it was meant to before the war. Most Romans don’t venture to the ethnography museum after grade school, although they’ll wax nostalgic when reminded of it. Mr. Fuksas’s building adds a giant bauble in what’s still the middle of nowhere, albeit it’s too early to say for sure what this stretch of suburb will become when the congress hall opens, and housing arrives. What’s clear is only that the effort to push Rome’s livable, cultural space outward from the center is a step in the right direction. Just a step.
Or, as Mr. Fuksas phrased it, “Architecture is interesting, but by itself it means nothing.”
Especially when some of the best of it is falling down. Exhibit A: the Domus Aurea, the Golden Villa that Nero built near the Colosseum, where a vaulted gallery fell this spring. Nobody was hurt, fortunately. That’s because the place has been closed since 2008, plagued by structural problems and humidity, which threatens the frescoes. To much fanfare, the city opened part of the site for tourists in 1999. Then heavy rain collapsed a section of roof, the site was closed, reopened a while later, then closed again.
A commission assigned to address the problem spent millions but didn’t forestall the latest mishap. Construction workers were fussing with earthmovers, bits and pieces of ancient columns, broken pots and scaffolding one recent morning. Fedora Filippi, a veteran archaeologist lately put in charge, pointed out where the roof gave way in what is actually an adjacent gallery built under Trajan, after Nero. Rain seeped from a park above, she said. Everybody has known about the leaking for ages. But the park is city-owned, and the Domus Aurea is national property, so the problem is no one’s to solve.
“Everyone is paralyzed,” Ms. Filippi said. “We have problems specific to this site and, yes, we have Italian problems, too.”
After the Domus Aurea gave way, some chunks fell off the Colosseum. Salvo Barrano, vice president of Italy’s Association of National Archaeologists, afterward listed threats to the aqueducts, the Palatine. The country is basically one giant archaeological site, Mr. Barrano said, with every town and region vying for resources, no politician willing to make hard choices, and too few qualified engineers and archaeologists in charge.
“The problem for the last 12 or 13 years is that the country has stopped investing in culture,” he said. “In cases like the Domus Aurea, there just isn’t a quick enough political payoff for politicians to invest more resources.”
Mr. Barrano drew a few graphs and flow charts on a sheet of scrap paper, a Dante-like diagram of multilayered chaos, to describe Italy’s culture administration. He sighed.
But then along comes Maxxi, at $223 million, indulged over a decade during which the government changed three times. The architect Zaha Hadid was hired to do for Rome what Frank Gehry did for Bilbao, Spain — never mind that Rome is not Bilbao. Mr. Gehry’s branch of the Guggenheim Museum put a previously obscure city on the culture map; in Maxxi’s case, it’s an obscure residential neighborhood beyond the old walls, although the hope is that the museum might get tourists thinking of Rome in general as a destination for new art, not just old.
Truth be told, the museum, begun in a climate of architectural hype that countenanced impractical, sometimes impossible, spaces in the name of sexy but increasingly clichéd curves, has an air of already bygone taste. While money was poured almost entirely into (often inelegant) construction, Maxxi’s collection and programming, not to mention its bare-bones though top-flight staff, have had to scrape by with what was left. It was a clear case of exactly what Rome lacks.
“Foresight” was Mr. Fuksas’s word for it. He was giving a hardhat tour of the congress building the other afternoon, pointing out where an auditorium shaped like twisted taffy will float atop the roof overlooking what’s now a city more populous than Paris.
“So the true city is no longer the historic one but the one on the so-called periphery, and to become successful we need to accept a new concept of greater Rome,” Mr. Fuksas added. “Immigrants need to sleep somewhere, after all, even the illegal ones.”
New Rome, old Rome. Roberto Cecchi, in charge of overseeing the city’s prized but crumbling archaeological sites, had a strikingly similar refrain: “Roman engineers worried 2,000 years ago about maintaining the city,” he said. “We must set down methods and rules. We must start to think ahead, not just respond when crises happen.”
So in theory everyone’s on the same page.
But who knows? This is Rome. Some things are eternal.
- Appuntamenti (45)
- Best (136)
- Cultura (95)
- Fotografia (26)
- Internet-Media (108)
- Lettere (20)
- Libri (25)
- Mondo (2.247)
- Ndrangheta (4)
- Politica (192)
- Società (3.531)
-
andrea
Flavia Perina in questa prosa che filtra cose a lei scomode (Elena Pacinelli) e amplifica particolari insignificanti (presnuto gramscianesimo della… -
Alessandro Londero
Salve, se Paolo Brogi avesse richiamato magari avrebbe potuto avere più info di quel viaggio. Ora che l’ONU ha fatto… -
Geneva
Hi there to every body, it's my first visit of this blog; this webpage consists of awesome and in fact…
- Aprile 2022
- Marzo 2022
- Febbraio 2022
- Gennaio 2022
- Dicembre 2021
- Novembre 2021
- Ottobre 2021
- Maggio 2021
- Marzo 2021
- Febbraio 2021
- Gennaio 2021
- Dicembre 2020
- Settembre 2020
- Maggio 2020
- Aprile 2020
- Marzo 2020
- Febbraio 2020
- Giugno 2019
- Maggio 2019
- Aprile 2019
- Marzo 2019
- Gennaio 2019
- Novembre 2018
- Ottobre 2018
- Settembre 2018
- Agosto 2018
- Giugno 2018
- Maggio 2018
- Marzo 2018
- Febbraio 2018
- Gennaio 2018
- Novembre 2017
- Ottobre 2017
- Maggio 2017
- Aprile 2017
- Marzo 2017
- Febbraio 2017
- Gennaio 2017
- Dicembre 2016
- Novembre 2016
- Ottobre 2016
- Settembre 2016
- Agosto 2016
- Luglio 2016
- Giugno 2016
- Maggio 2016
- Aprile 2016
- Marzo 2016
- Febbraio 2016
- Gennaio 2016
- Dicembre 2015
- Novembre 2015
- Ottobre 2015
- Settembre 2015
- Agosto 2015
- Luglio 2015
- Giugno 2015
- Maggio 2015
- Aprile 2015
- Marzo 2015
- Febbraio 2015
- Gennaio 2015
- Dicembre 2014
- Novembre 2014
- Ottobre 2014
- Settembre 2014
- Agosto 2014
- Luglio 2014
- Giugno 2014
- Maggio 2014
- Aprile 2014
- Marzo 2014
- Febbraio 2014
- Gennaio 2014
- Dicembre 2013
- Novembre 2013
- Ottobre 2013
- Settembre 2013
- Agosto 2013
- Luglio 2013
- Giugno 2013
- Maggio 2013
- Aprile 2013
- Marzo 2013
- Febbraio 2013
- Gennaio 2013
- Dicembre 2012
- Novembre 2012
- Ottobre 2012
- Settembre 2012
- Agosto 2012
- Luglio 2012
- Giugno 2012
- Maggio 2012
- Aprile 2012
- Marzo 2012
- Febbraio 2012
- Gennaio 2012
- Dicembre 2011
- Novembre 2011
- Ottobre 2011
- Settembre 2011
- Agosto 2011
- Luglio 2011
- Giugno 2011
- Maggio 2011
- Aprile 2011
- Marzo 2011
- Febbraio 2011
- Gennaio 2011
- Dicembre 2010
- Novembre 2010
- Ottobre 2010
- Settembre 2010
- Agosto 2010
- Luglio 2010
- Giugno 2010
- Maggio 2010
- Aprile 2010
- Marzo 2010
- Febbraio 2010
- Gennaio 2010