Rome’s Contemporary Past - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 167

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Rome's Contemporary past

Valerie higgins

i is Rome's ancient past a blessing or a curse? This may seem a strange question
to ask seeing that classical heritage is an essential part of the identity of the city
and revenue from cultural tourism underpins its economy. on the other hand,
its patrimony can also be seen as a block to development and an insurmount-
able obstacle to Rome taking its place as a dynamic twenty-first-century global
city. During the twentieth century, there was a conservative approach to cultural
heritage which sought to protect historic cities by isolating them from economic
development. Recently there has been a greater acceptance that heritage can be a
functioning part of a modern economy and an increased awareness that turning
cities into fossilized open air museums generates intractable social, economic,
and conservation problems. Rome has remained somewhat resistant, though not
immune, to these new trends. This chapter will explore the relationship between
cultural heritage protection and urban development in Rome since 1960 with
particular reference to the impact on three groups: the local population of Rome,
the wider italian nation that looks to Rome as its capital, and the international
community attracted by heritage tourism. Discussions concerning development
in Rome are often dominated by the practical difficulties generated by its dense
cultural patrimony, but equally important are the ideological issues concerning
what the city symbolizes, what past it seeks to protect, and to whom this past
belongs.

Developments in heritage protection in the later twentieth Century
in 1960, a conference held in Gubbio, in central italy, established what would be-
come normal practice for heritage protection in italy's historic cities. The Gubbio
Charter, as it came to be called, viewed the historic center as, in effect, a single
monument that was to be preserved intact and isolated from all modern devel-
opment. indeed, it was this document that first coined the phrase centro storico

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