Foreign Pupils, Bad Citizens - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 84

the italian baby boom as well as rapid urbanization) led to the construction of a
second primary school, the Grazia Deledda, on the south side of the Via Casilina.
This is one of the radial roads that cross the city and the neighborhood developed
along it.
The pisacane school, simply by virtue of its geographical location, began to
have a more and more negative image among residents as the “school for the lo-
cal crooks.” for reasons of social distinction, anyone who could manage to, sent
their children to Grazia Deledda, thus triggering a downward spiral in which
pisacane gradually became known as the school for “those marranella types.”
from the 1980s, the population of the neighborhood began to fall, owing to
the demographic crisis that affected many areas across Rome. The low demand
for housing and the marranella district's bad reputation kept property prices
very low, whereas they began to rise in other parts of the district, such as pigneto
(pompeo 2011). immigrants arriving from the late 1980s onward found that the
marranella area was just what they wanted. prices were low and young foreign
workers found that the trains going along Via Casilina were a good (if spartan)
way of getting to the historic city center, where they often worked in bars and res-
taurants (pompeo 2011). following the five successive amnesties enacted under
italian law between 1990 and 2009,2 many of them obtained a residence permit
that allowed family members to join them. over the years, the torpignattara
district witnessed an increase in the number of foreigners, in particular ban-
gladeshis, egyptians, and, a few years later, Chinese. even though many groups
of single male immigrants continued to live in the decrepit apartments of mar-
ranella (priori 2011), the number of reunited families grew rapidly. They began
to use the municipal services available in the district, including the schools; and
pisacane was there, very large and effectively underused as regards numbers of
pupils, given that many parents (as we have seen) preferred to send their children
to Grazia Deledda and to leave pisacane for “those marranella types.”
in the second half of the 1990s, when the immigrant presence in the district
was becoming evident, a further factor contributed to the ongoing exodus of ital-
ians to other schools. The headmistress at that time is remembered as someone
who was reluctant to engage in dialogue and was often in conflict with the teach-
ing staff. Thus a vicious circle was created in which the school, already burdened
in the 1970s and 1980s by ill repute for those who attended it, saw its reputation
worsen in the 1990s with regard to the education that it offered, given the exces-
sive turnover of the teachers who went elsewhere as soon as they could.
it was only at this point (when the number of italian pupils was falling in
any case) that the presence of the foreign parents became substantial. most of
them had settled in the marranella district, yet they were inevitably uninformed
about the bad reputation of the local school, given their restricted social con-
tact with italians in the neighborhood. They turned to pisacane as the “natural”