Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [78]
The destruction originally committed in order to create this road was certainly enormous. Among the buildings demolished were important antiquities-most from the imperial era!-as well as medieval, Renaissance, and baroque churches. The ancient remains were dumped along the Via Osti- ense, the modern road leading to the ancient port of Rome at Ostia, now a suburban zone but at the time a malarial swamp that the Fascists thereby hoped to sanitize. Architectural historian Italo Insolera writes with undisguised astonishment, "Malaria fought with the dust of ancient Rome: that was one of the most extraordinary things about that insane era."" A significant segment of Monti's inhabited area, notably the subdistrict known as Marforio, was also obliterated. Mussolini's intervention, with its obsessively literal and exclusive derivation of romanita (Romanness) from the days of imperial glory, caused great hardship among the living population, forcing many of those evicted for his self-aggrandizing scheme to migrate to unpleasant, distant suburbs.12 It was, surprisingly, a neofascist architect who pointed out the irony that Mussolini's ceremonial roadway was probably the greatest disruption ever made to the urban plan of ancient Rome.
There were thus powerful reasons for Rutelli's administration to obliterate this embarrassing past. But the new archaeological restoration project now proposed oddly echoed Fascism's own preoccupations with the grandeur of romanita and with the creation of clean monumental spaces. It was widely viewed, not as an attempt to rescue an important archaeological site from Mussolini's depredations, but as a leftist act of revenge. Even my relatively moderate landlord, the grandson of an engineer who had worked for the Papal State until Unification and then had become a functionary of the new Italian authorities, sniffed that the only reason for it was hatred of the Fascists' memory, and he suggested that this was all of a piece with their fussy regulation of such matters as the colors used to paint house facades. Archaeology has become a problem of excess and nuisance in the eyes of those conservative souls who simply want to continue to live as before. "A modern city can't be a museum city," he fumed. While he hankered indulgently for the Fascists' entrepreneurial modernism, he had little stomach for the bureaucratic modernism of today's political Left, with its rendition of historic conservation as an exercise in audit management and boundary building.
Even relatively poor residents were often surprisingly adamant in their opposition to the demolition of the road and the extension of the archaeological park to cover a much larger area. It was particularly ironic to hear Monti residents inveigh against the Rutelli administration for daring to contemplate the removal of Mussolini's grand processional way. Opposition to the scheme, in the mouths of the descendants and former neighbors of those evicted under the Fascists, shows how the policies of the Italian Left-at both the city and the national levels-had alienated its traditional supporters; these working-class citizens all but forgot their hatred of Fascism as their dislike of the "radical chic" in the city administration intensified to incandescence, fueled, in many cases, by an epidemic of evictions that came to rival the "disemboweling" ~sventramento) of the historic city center during the Fascist era. As the debate raged on, arguments favoring archeological restoration and air quality improvement the area was supposed to be cleared of traffic) were increasingly ignored, and the Rutelli administration eventually lost interest-much to the disgust of critics like Berdini, for whom the lackadaisical, piecemeal approach to Rome's problems is nothing short of a surrender to the power cliques that dominate policy decisions.13
Some of those who locally criticized the original plan may have been especially inspired, or lured, by opportunistic right-wing