Marginal Centers - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 212

place where i cannot see the sun set,” (enza) “i come here to relax,” (franca) “this
place disgusts and enchants me.” when setting aside for a brief moment their ob-
jective living conditions, residents speak about a man-made world that can still
produce strong emotions. it is when the researcher asks why they keep resisting
in a “hopeless” place where they are not welcome, in homes put together piece
by piece with no formal plan or aesthetic, that these residents show a capacity
for sensorial detail, an absence of temporality, an ability to collapse space and
time typical of the writings of Roh, borges, or Garcia marquez. it is this capacity
to be simultaneously realists and utopians, anarchic and integrated, ethical and
amoral that make the residents of idroscalo “special” and their community one
of the last pieces of Rome that, at least from a formal and structural point of view,
is not anonymous. a new vision for Rome could well start from here.
Notes
1. The oldest nucleus of Garbatella, neighborhood Concordia, was initiated before fas-
cism, on 18 february 1920. The construction of montesacro began in 1924 with the name of
Città Giardino aniene (the “garden city of aniene”).
2. to understand the effects of relocalization on collective psychology in the u.s. context,
see fullilove (2004).
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