Torpignattara/Banglatown - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 68

The murals at largo pettazzoni. Photo by Alessandra Broccolini.
the public service, was by contrast very active in the neighborhood committee,
created about fifteen years earlier, and had no intention of moving from an area
that she loved and considered to be an “important” place from the viewpoint of
culture, archaeology, and intercultural dialogue. The closer you move toward Via
prenestina, the smaller the immigrant presence, and, according to the received
wisdom, this raises the social status of people living in the seclusion of the apart-
ment blocks. beyond the frontier, in the “bangladeshi zone” of torpignattara, the
original inhabitants consist mainly of elderly people, pensioners (former brick-
layers or manual laborers of various types, small shopkeepers) and their offspring
who have a sentimental attachment to the place. a recently arrived group of new
residents is represented by students and single people, attracted by being near
pigneto and by the “multicultural” air of the zone;11 they live side by side with
low-income families from various backgrounds, who in general are less attracted
to ideas of cultural “otherness.”
The network of streets with a high proportion of bangladeshis (known to
the older inhabitants as the marranella) has for some years been renamed ban-
glatown by the bangladeshis themselves: a renaming that indicates, as we shall
shortly see, a process of creating a locality that follows the routes of migration
with a strong transnational character.