Diversely Global Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 8

politics, Rome became capital of the modern italian state to compensate for this
extraordinary political fragmentation, and mostly due to the city's weakness.
from the early Risorgimento in the nineteenth century, Republicans, mon-
archists, and unitarians all embraced Rome as the center of their political pro-
grams. Catholics close to papal power were among the few to resist the idea of
Rome as the italian capital. it was rejected exactly by those politicians and sec-
tors of civil society which were actually living and operating in Rome. so, while
“l'italia ha bisogno di Roma” (“italy needs Rome!”) was a common slogan be-
tween 1861 and 1870 during the unification of italy, the inverse statement (e.g.,
that Rome needed italy) was far less heard.
Rome's peculiar political history also relates to its economy. The fight against
localism and regionalism was a necessity for the emerging Northern italian
bourgeoisie, striving to impose a fully fledged capitalistic mode of production.
a national market had to be guaranteed beyond regional entrepreneurial and
industrial traditions. Due to its economic weakness, only Rome could act as a
neutral guarantor for the implementation of italian capitalism. Capitalist farm-
ing and modern industries in italy grew up predominantly in the northwest of
the country, concentrated within the “industrial triangle” of milan, turin, and
Genoa. as Rome became capital in 1870, this did not really change. The busi-
nesses that developed in the growing capital were all connected to transport,
consumer sales, and administration.
in a very real sense, Rome was a “service sector” city long before terms like
information economy and postindustrialization had been invented. Rome today
is not “postindustrial,” for it was never industrial in the first place. indeed, after
1871, the new italian political leadership purposefully avoided the development
of industrial sectors in the eternal City because they were afraid that a politi-
cized proletariat in Rome would cause too much trouble (Caracciolo 1956, 61-62).
Rome had to serve as a docile body of political centralization. working-class
neighborhoods, like those just barely visible today in testaccio or Garbatella,
grew up around trade and distribution of foodstuffs. mussolini's plan for a self-
sufficient national economy certainly did not make Rome independent in terms
of consumer goods, except perhaps in the vegetables that were grown in the agro
romano (the Roman countryside) and the various “garden cities” (see trabalzi,
chapter 17), especially as the economic crisis before and during world war ii
worsened. italy's first “economic miracle,” booming from 1957, radically altered
Rome and its physical shape, with new palazzine (apartment buildings) mush-
rooming around and outside the historic center. but italy's economic miracle still
did not turn Rome into a center of production.
here lies another feature of modern Rome discussed elsewhere in this vol-
ume: The built city was most often not the result of rational, centralized urban
planning. Various periods of building booms massively expanded the city, in
often chaotic and unplanned ways that still characterize it today. italy's second