Torpignattara/Banglatown - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 63

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torpignattara/banglatown

Processes of Reurbanization and Rhetorics
of Locality in a Suburb of Rome

alessandra broccolini
(translated by Jennifer Radice)

o ne winter morning in 2010, i was strolling along a street in the torpignat-
tara neighborhood on the outskirts of Rome, where i have been engaged for some
years in an ethnographic study of the bangladeshi community in the area, when
i saw a piece of plastic that had been taken from the rebuilding of a phone center
and fixed to a wall. someone unknown, who obviously wanted to annoy the ban-
gladeshi community, had written on the piece of plastic the name of a nonexis-
tent street: Via della banglanella. This very visible sign, opposite the sign with the
street's real name—Via della marranella—was a mocking allusion to the massive
colonization of that district by the bangladeshi diaspora. for the whole morning,
this improvised street sign, probably written by an italian, remained on the street
in full view of passersby until someone threw it into a nearby litter bin, where it
nevertheless remained very visible for the rest of the day.
it seems to me that this anecdote, relating as it does to old and new names
for urban spaces, serves as a good introduction to an essay that considers the new
forms of urban settlement initiated by the bangladeshi diaspora.

torpignattara, a Roman neighborhood
torpignattara, a historic district in Rome's eastern periphery, has been the desti-
nation during the past fifteen years for large numbers of immigrants, especially
from bangladesh, who have brought about major changes in social life (see also
Cervelli, chapter 3). This area, historically working-class and of ill repute, was a
place of internal migration from central and southern italy at the beginning of
the twentieth century. in the 1980s, it suffered a progressive fall in its population,

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