a note from the underground
The sun sets on the Eternal City. While richly-decorated triumphal arches testify to the former empire’s greed, exotic obelisks remind of its vastness. The Capitoline hill casts its shadow on the remains of an “insula”. On the Tiber isle, a cheerful crowd enjoys the evening attractions. Nearby, in Trastevere, a gentle hum arises from the terraces.
Rome welcomes about twenty million tourists a year. Middle-aged couples book romantic city trips. Retirees visit the city on a package tour. Youngsters improvise trips flying low-cost and staying in bed and breakfasts. Business travellers sojourn in four-star hotels. Exchange students party hard all year long. Life is sweet in the Eternal City, isn’t it?
Amid the crowd, ambulant vendors routinely demonstrate the most useless of toys. In restaurants, young men apathetically sell flowers while others –tucked away in the kitchen– frenetically prepare meals. Inside hotels, hasty cleaners try to be as invisible as possible.
Who are these people? Where do they go to after work? Where do they live?
Via Cassia, “chilometro zero”: from Ponte Milvio the road meanders up hill and down dale. On both sides of the road, posh villas and luxury condos alternate. The balconies are lavishly decorated with flowers and tropical plants. Many offer a splendid view on the natural reserve park. As expensive cars drive in and out of gates, trimmed gardens and neat swimming pools appear. CCTV cameras monitor every movement.
The sister of the president of the nation lives here. A senator and leader of a political party used to live here. In the local supermarket, one can spot television celebrities, famous actors and models.
Hidden in private or dead-end streets, isolated blocks of flats contrast with the villas. The buildings carry names like “residence” and “fabbricato”. The peeling paint reveals concrete that is exfoliating. Here, the balconies are packed with furniture and other belongings.
The squares in front of the buildings are covered with shattered bottles of beer. People are cooking in the open. The smell of exotic food is pervasive.
Innumerable satellite dishes indicate the presence of overseas immigrants. Almost every letter box carries a foreign name. A dozen of languages sound from the open doors and windows. At any time of the day, loud music is playing. Latin rhythms clash with oriental melodies.
Italian flags mark the few apartments that are still occupied by locals. With its harsh stance on immigration, Gianni Alemanno’s right-wing party collected more than half of the votes of this locality during the latest municipal elections.
On the parking lot, there is the charred carcass of a motorcycle. Used heroin needles are littering the pavement. An improvised path reveals construction debris. The parking lot turns out to be built on top of a former garbage belt!
Here lives Rome’s Lumpenproletariat. Bengalese cooks, Philippine maids, Senegalese gardeners, Sri Lankan hotel porters, Rumanian butchers, … Whereas Marx’s poor lived in the shadow of heavy industry, Rome’s poor work in the leisure industry.
Inside the buildings there is a Hidden City: a labyrinth of stairs and dark, narrow corridors. Cave storage rooms have been transformed into tiny basement apartments.
In order to pay the exorbitant rent, up to four people share a room as small as thirteen and a half square metres. Entire families have to live in one room. Mattresses are laid one next to the other. Furniture and laundry are put in the corridor. To increase the habitable surface the lodgers cobble together mezzanines.
The dwellings do not comply with any of the building regulations and safety requirements. Tapped electric wires run through the corridors. Black stains on the walls indicate high levels of mould. There have been cases of tuberculosis in the area.
Many lodgings do not count a single window. Those inside the building are right on top of the garage forcing their residents to inhale car emissions. Lodgers living in the exterior basements only get to inhale the return air of the air-conditioning.
With a rather morbid sense of humour, Italians call these lodgings “loculi”, i.e. Columbarium niches. The lodgers use gas cylinders for cooking and heating, thereby turning the rooms into time bombs waiting to go off. People have been buried alive in these rooms following gas explosions and fires.
The lodgers try to improve their situation. However, differences in ethnical background, legal status, time schedule and a complex system of subletting make brotherhood rather difficult. These blocks of flats are modern Towers of Babel.
The buildings are conveniently close to the villas. This way, the upper class has its servants within arm’s reach. While most immigrants sell their skills, some sell drugs, others just sell their body. Italians that visit these buildings wear sunglasses so as to not be recognised. They anxiously look for a particular door. In the cave apartments exotic prostitutes work 24/7.
However, there is protest from native inhabitants. Italians who do pay taxes and who do not exploit foreigners. They form committees. For decades they have been addressing the issue to the local community council. Apparently, they are barking up the wrong tree.
Ownership of the dwellings can be traced back to Rome’s cream of the crop, “la Roma bene”. Property advertisements promise excellent returns. “Ottimo use investimento.” The square foot price even tops that of posh Parioli!
A couple of buildings belong to an “ingegnere”. His grandson seats in the local community council. In one of the buildings –in which the engineer managed to transform twenty apartments into two hundred “loculi”– gas explosions and fires have caused casualties.
An apartment that was centre to a blackmail scandal involving the left-wing president of the region and a Brazilian prostitute turned out to be owned by two politicians linked to mayor Alemanno. One of both heads Roma Entrate, the entity that is responsible for investigating tax evasion. Like all landlords in the area, he insisted on rent paid cash in hand. Alemanno’s party talks the talk, but does it walk the walk?
In the same building, several apartments belong to three board members of the real estate branch of the Vatican bank!
From time to time, the official forces inspect these buildings. They draw up a report. Whereas the lodgers become homeless, the owners are hardly ever prosecuted. Does it come as a surprise that a late police commander owned a number of properties in the area?
When the protest attracts too much media coverage, the slum landlords simply move the scene to another part of the city.
A theory on the fall of the Roman Empire states that towards the end of the empire nobody was willing to defend it any longer. The élite kept on importing foreigners from all over the empire in order to keep wages low and rents high. In Rome, while the happy few lived in splendour, life was a nightmare to the majority of the inhabitants.
Once a vast construction site where slaves erected monuments, mass tourism has turned the centre of Rome into an immense sweatshop in which illegal immigrants are serving well-off citizens and tourists. “Nihil nove sub sole”?
Mike Dilien
