Greening Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 257

paul's outside the walls, is the utopia garden, which is the outcome of a collab-
orative project between the international social service and the monte dei Cocci
(hill of Clay pots) association of herbalists from the neighborhood of testaccio.
The group's mission is to manage and cultivate the green area around a farmhouse
known as Casale Garibaldi (which supposedly housed the famous general when
he arrived in Rome in the late 1870s), together with the neighborhood residents.16
along the Via ardeatina, twenty former workers of the now-closed eutelia com-
puter factory have created eutorto (eut Kitchen Garden), a shared orchard and
vegetable garden on the property of the Giuseppe Garibaldi high school, which
specializes in agricultural studies.17 eutorto includes one thousand olive plants,
vineyards, and a milk farm that produces over a thousand liters of milk per day.
eutorto is particularly important from a social point of view because it shows
how urban farming, apart from generating income, can be fundamental to the
identity and social role of workers who lose their jobs. as explained by mario,
eutorto has been fundamental in making “them” (i.e., the group of unemployed
workers) feel productive again. in particular, mario describes how complex it is
to explain this feeling to someone who has never felt “the sense of frustration, of
being robbed of one's rights, of isolation caused by malfeasance on the part of
management.” passing from the mouse to the shovel has not been easy for this
group of workers. Nonetheless, reinventing their identity through urban farm-
ing has been the answer to seeking a job which, in a low-tech city such as Rome,
could well take a whole lifetime of effort.
since 2008, in prato fiorito, a social cooperative whose activities aim to in-
tegrate disadvantaged youths and seniors has managed a 1 ha urban vineyard
called parco dell'acqua e Vino (park of water and wine). The cooperative pro-
duces wine and, in addition to various local social integration programs, also
supports a number of social projects in developing countries. in particular, the
sale of wine helps the cooperative to provide drinking water to the saharawi pop-
ulation of western sahara.
in the aniene River park is Coltivatorre (The “Cultivatower”), a project
initiated in 1997 by a cooperative for social promotion aimed at disadvantaged
youths, whose activities include organic farming and gardening. in the far east-
ern periphery along Via tiburtina, in piazza bozzi, a civic group has occupied
and cleared an abandoned plot of land to create a soccer field and to foster other
initiatives, including farming. in Via Capoprati near the tiber River, on an aban-
doned property of the ministry of finance, volunteers of the environmental as-
sociation legambiente work with private citizens to manage a vegetable garden
which also hosts other social endeavors throughout the year.
Quarto degli ebrei in Via Domenico montagnana in northwestern Rome,
between the Rome-Viterbo railway and the ring road, is an area in which a num-
ber of civic associations manage over two hundred vegetable gardens. in the same
part of town is monumento Naturale parco della Cellulosa, a 100 ha park where