Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape

INTRODUCTION: ROME, POSTMODERN NARRATIVES OF A CITYSCAPE Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin It is history, above all, that one reads quite diferently [in Rome] from anywhere else in the world. J. W. Goethe1 Until the mid-twentieth century, a vast majority of cultural representations of Rome within the Western collective imagination relied, almost incessantly, on notions or echoes of the classical city: from ‘Caput Mundi’ or the ‘Eternal City’, to the ‘Divine City’ of Christendom or the ‘City of Ruins’ of the Grand Tour. hroughout the decades these temporalities have been preserved and have coexisted, moulding the image of the Italian capital as though a palimpsest of written and re-written layers, whose original traces never completely fade. he metaphor of the palimpsest, bound to the pre-modern topography of the city with its synchronic coexistence of diferent historical layers, was established throughout the centuries by the descriptions of fascinated travellers, amazed by the persistence of historical buildings and remnants of history within Rome’s cityscape. For Goethe, visiting Rome meant visiting history itself,2 while for Freud the urban fabric of ‘he Eternal City’ mirrored the inner structure of the human mind, in which layers of past memory-traces, conscious and unconscious, coexist.3 Ater the Second World War, when Italy was integrated into the Western bloc and consequently pressured to conform to a neo-liberal capitalist model, Rome was drastically redeined by the contemporary economic and social upheaval and the growth and expansion that accompanied this period. A general population increase, domestic migrations and a turn away from agriculture accompanied post-war regeneration and a relatively rapid re-building of infrastructure, forcing the city to spread far beyond its traditional limits. From the 1920s on, Rome’s population multiplied approximately seven times and its surface became ten times larger, encompassing vast directional and commercial areas.4 his triggered a rupture, a separation of the city into two distinct parts: the historical city centre, within the Aurelian Walls, and the modern periphery. Copyright –1– 2 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape he separation of the city has reverberated through the various ways of thinking Rome in recent years, leading to two distinct and complementary approaches to the city. he irst of these focuses on the fortune, or the decay, of the (historical) city’s classical image, with the key paradigm of the city and unwavering point of reference thus being the ‘Eternal City’. he second concentrates on Rome’s urban and suburban modern growth, highlighting the sharp contrast between the beauty of Rome’s ancient city centre and the ugliness or corruption of its modern peripheries. In many cases of the latter, the implicit dichotomy of the corrupt periphery with the beauty of the historical centre signals that the same patrimonial notion of ‘Eternal Rome’ pervades both of these approaches. Examples of the irst approach to the city include Peter Bondanella’s he Eternal City, and Catharine Edwards’s edited volume Roman Presences.5 he former aims to identify the ongoing presence of the myth of Rome from the time of Livy and Tacitus to its use in Asimov’s Foundation cycle and the Star Wars trilogy; the latter analyses the inluential role that Rome’s classical image had in the construction of a modern European identity. In spite of their diferent aims, both examples attempt ultimately to sustain the enduring legacy/legacies of Rome’s classical past, stressing the existence of an archetypal Imperial imaginary. Another, more recent, example of this strand is Michael Herzfeld’s Evicted rom Eternity: he Restructuring of Modern Rome. hough Herzfeld’s goal difers somewhat, since he describes the recent process of gentriication within speciically the Monti quarter, the framework that he uses is similar, as he nostalgically reads the disappearance of local life from this area of Rome in terms of the fading away of Rome’s eternality: ‘[h]ere, eternally, eternity continues to fracture and to coalesce, repeatedly and without rest’.6 For each of these studies, the signiier ‘Rome’ evokes images of its glorious, classical past. he second approach to Rome, which focuses on its modern face, has been led by pioneering urbanists such as Italo Insolera and Antonio Cederna, and the important scholars that followed them.7 While these studies are key to understanding the post-war restructuring of Rome, since they have unveiled the foundational role played by estate speculation and political corruption in the post-war reconstruction of the city, they have also established the basis for a conservative framework of rejection and complaint against every attempt to provide alternative readings of Rome’s contemporary image. A clear legacy of this framework is the furious cries which followed the inauguration of the museum of the Ara Pacis, designed by American architect Richard Meier in 2006 (see Trentin’s contribution to this volume on pp. 101–17). he essays collected in Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape emerge from a diferent position. Rather than lamenting the loss of the ‘eternal’ aspects of the city as a consequence of modernity and postmodernity, the essays col- Copyright Introduction 3 lected here aim to problematize the universal idea of Rome by incorporating and absorbing the fragments, the detritus and the hidden zones of the city’s contemporary image. In this sense, it participates in the ongoing formation of a third framework of studies on recent Rome, which follows some of the theoretical insights expressed by historian Vittorio Vidotto in his seminal Roma Contemporanea. As Vidotto writes, traditional approaches to Rome based on the complete rejection of its modernity produced ‘una sostanziale incomprensione storica della città, incapace di cogliere e di volgere in positivo la complessità dei fattori della trasformazione urbana’ (a substantial historical misunderstanding of the city, which was incapable of understanding and reading at all positively the complexity of the various factors that contribute to urban transformation).8 Sharing in Vidotto’s sentiment from a theoretical point of view, Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape challenges both the grand narratives of Rome as ‘Eternal City’, and Rome as a modern hell, models which have limited the possibility to read, interpret and analyse the complexities of Rome’s contemporary cityscape. While it is very important to recognize the singular importance of the irst two ields of Rome studies, in founding itself on the third this book seeks to enact something of a shit from the critical framework in which the previous models participate.9 his third approach to the city, which has produced a number of important contributions to contemporary Rome studies in recent years, thus examines the contemporary city in open, plural and inclusive rather than binary terms.10 Rejecting the dichotomy between the supposedly glorious ancient city and the allegedly squalid modern one in favour of a dialectical understanding nevertheless raises a very tricky question: how to go beyond the weighty presence of Rome’s classical past, without rejecting it outright. he special issue of Annali d’Italianistica entitled ‘Capital City: Rome 1870–2010’ represents a relevant instance of the third approach to Rome; the essays quite speciically focus on Rome’s post-unitary modernity in a universal study of the city’s speciic trajectory (taking into account centre and periphery). In the introduction to the volume editor Cristina Mazzoni writes: Copyright the capital has served as a mirror in which to contemplate the problem of modernity. More than any other city, Rome typiies the insistent presence of the past in Italy, and the seemingly insurmountable challenge of freeing Italians from the constraints of tradition.11 While Mazzoni’s understanding of Rome as an incubator for important insight on modernity is undoubtedly fruitful, it is in relation to this historical anxiety that we seek to ofer, if not some resolution, then certainly some new insight. We do so in fact by turning to Rome’s postmodern narratives, taking the city as a mirror in which to contemplate the problem of postmodernity, and its own, striking re-appropriations of history, as we illustrate below. 4 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape his collection of essays is the irst attempt to frame Rome’s cityscape in light of postmodern theories. As Mazzoni’s edited issue illustrates, even the most valuable studies on contemporary Rome have been notably resistant to notions of postmodernity and have rather preferred to articulate their analyses singularly within the framework of modernity. In Mazzoni’s introduction, notwithstanding the fact that the volume covers a temporal arch which stretches to 2010, and that some of the included contributions explicitly address postmodern concerns,12 the discussion turns singularly around the notion of Rome’s modernity, never its postmodernity. In many senses this evident hesitation to confront Rome’s postmodernity is understandable, not only because of a critical tendency to emphasize Rome’s comparatively late modernity, but also due to the glaring incompatibilities of the city with the majority of theoretical, urban conceptions of the postmodern. Rome cannot easily be likened to Los Angeles, or to New York, London or Paris, within the frameworks of canonical postmodern concepts: it is not an emblematic city in terms of lexible accumulation, nor is it a world city of multinational capital or of post-industrialization. he Italian capital has never been an important global–industrial centre, rarely an important domestic centre: instead it is typically Milan which assumes this status (indeed the Italian headquarters of numerous multinational companies are in Milan). According to recent research conducted by the Globalization and World Cities Network – an organization which every few years publishes a list ranking the most important global cities based on the impact of their advanced tertiary services – Rome does not belong to the so-called ‘Alpha Cities’, the irst group of global cities which comprises, among others, Milan, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles, Shanghai and Beijing. Rome is instead a ‘Beta City’, grouped together with other capitals like Manila, Tel Aviv and Cairo.13 Yet in spite of its apparent inancial peripherality, Rome is at the heart of Italian media production, and throughout the past eighty years it has remained an important international hub of cinematic production. Rome furthermore is undoubtedly at the forefront of global tourism. here is little doubt that Rome’s historical city centre – with its ancient stones and temples, its Renaissance buildings and Baroque churches – is one of the most attractive entertainment industries in the world. Every year it attracts millions of people from all over the world; people who circulate around the city, take in the city and capture the spectacle of the city with their cameras. It is precisely the relationship between its relative industrial and inancial peripherality and its centrality in media and tourist production which, in our interpretation, makes Rome one of the most interesting cases for capturing the reticular complexity of the postmodern shit. he following essays do not seek to impose a view of what the postmodern is by attempting, deductively, a general deinition of it through which we frame the object ‘postmodern Rome’. Nor do they do this inductively, by combining Copyright Introduction 5 the individual deinitions in order to give a general idea of what ‘postmodern Rome’ might be. he volume approaches the postmodern by skipping the idea of universality that is intrinsic to both these ways, and instead attempts to construct an idea of postmodern Rome which is open, inclusive and osmotic. In sum, the aim is not to deine once and for all the idea of postmodern Rome, but rather to open up the possibility to think of Rome in pluralistic (including postmodern) ways, in other words an idea of the city that is detached from any claim to universalism or eternality. To re-semanticize Rome it will be necessary to turn to a series of alternative narratives. Postmodern Rome he question remains: why has such diiculty arisen in the study, analysis and description of Rome as postmodern? his has a threefold answer. First, it is a consequence of the infamous history that this term had within the Italian academic context, since the latter has typically informed international studies of modern Rome. As Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug put it, in their explanation of the resistance against the postmodern in studies of political engagement, ‘the category of the postmodern has experienced critical resistance, if not outright opposition, within the Italian intellectual ield’.14 Monica Jansen too has noted how publicly during the 1980s ‘la stampa italiana ha reso impossibile ogni seria rilessione sul postmoderno riiutandolo già dal principio come civetteria, come cedimento alla moda’ (the Italian press made any serious relection on the postmodern impossible, dismissing it from the beginning as coquetry, as submission to the latest fad). hough she then goes on to illustrate lucidly the importance of postmodern Italian thought, the fact that thanks to continued disputes and a lack of public acknowledgment this ultimately reaches little more than ‘un postmoderno ambiguo’ (an ambiguous postmodernity) demonstrates a irst important motive for the lack of studies of Rome and postmodernity.15 his aspect intersects with the second reason, the strong legacy that the romantic idea of Rome as ‘Eternal City’ still has today. his image, which was reproduced inside and outside Europe during the Grand Tour, has found a strong ally in the contemporary tourist industry. One of the most well-known tourist publications, the Michelin guide to Rome, (though we could have chosen descriptions from the Rough Guide, Lonely Planet, Time Out or any other mainstream guidebook), describes Rome as follows: Copyright Far more than a city, [it] is a series of eras stacked atop one another. Ruins, churches and palazzi provide spectacular detail to this modern metropolis that is, despite its fast pace, quite pleasant. Wide pedestrian boulevards, splendid parks and grand piazze – the spaces where residents and tourist converge – give Rome the feeling of an open-air museum. No other city in the world can compare.16 6 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape What this paradigmatic and traditional image evidently does not take into account, however, is the vast expanded urban space that followed Rome’s expansion during the twentieth century. Nowadays Rome is an impressive labyrinth of highways and junctions, suburban malls and gated communities which go far beyond the ancient Aurelian Walls that demarcate the historical centre. It has a metropolitan area of some four million inhabitants and an enormous communal area, the second biggest in Europe ater that of Greater London.17 However, in spite of this rapid expansion, and unlike any of Europe’s other global cities, what ‘Rome’ signiies in the vast majority of cases is still the space contained in the city centre. he third motive of resistance to the idea of a postmodern Rome involves the apparent incompatibility of its contemporary urbanscape with that of, for example, Los Angeles – by many considered the quintessential postmodern city. In the introduction to his he Postmodern Urban Condition, urban geographer Michael Dear identiies in the cityscape of contemporary Los Angeles the ‘prototype of contemporary urbanization’.18 his privileged status is for Dear a consequence of the city’s contemporary processes of deindustrialization and reindustrialization: the dismantling of the traditional space of the factory, and the constitution of new spaces of hi-tech production. In urban terms, what this produces is a highly dispersed, polymorphous and decentred cityscape characterized by the cohabitation of First and so-called hird-world forms of urbanism: gated communities as well as edge cities. Similarly, in hirdspace Edward Soja, in a perhaps too predictable way deines Los Angeles as a ‘postmetropolis’. According to Soja, the six characteristics which deine a postmetropolis are ‘a productively post-fordist industrial metropolis’, ‘a globalized and localized world city’, a ‘hyperreal scamscape of simulations and simulacra’ as well as a dispersed and expanding cityscape, the increase of inequalities and polarities between social classes and control over the territory.19 While Rome’s contemporary cityscape is indeed a dispersed, non-homogeneous and highly polarized territory which goes from Ostia and the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Apennine Mountains, it is certainly not the completely decentred suburban landscape that Los Angeles is. hough one of the aims of the last piano regolatore (urban master plan), approved in 2003, was to rebalance the unequal relationship between centre and periphery, in Rome the centre is still the dominant urban feature. he needs of the suburbs are very oten subordinated to those of the centre, which absorbs most of the city’s inancial resources.20 Moreover, crucially, Rome was never a major industrial centre and thus the postindustrial turn has afected very little of the Roman urbanscape (excluding the Ostiense area, as Keala Jewell observes in her contribution to this volume on pp. 119–36), which further removes any straightforward or obvious links between Rome and the typically postmodern. Despite the motives that have historically stood against postmodern readings of Rome, the following essays testify to our belief not only that Rome can Copyright Introduction 7 indeed be studied and approached in this context, but that it represents one of the most interesting examples of postmodern cityscapes within the global metropolitan map. ‘Postmodernizing’ the idea of Rome as the ‘Eternal City’ – that Eurocentric notion which for centuries mirrored the root of Western identity – is a necessary move that can help us to marginalize our Eurocentric gaze. In this respect, our idea of postmodern Rome inds its root in the deconstruction of the classical palimpsest, that image of a Rome as a stack of diferent eras which the contemporary tour guide still proposes, and inds instead its theoretical backbone in an anti-universal, anti-eternal, luid and decentred idea of its cityscape. Rome, or the Postmodern Palimpsest As has been done elsewhere, in order to situate any particular stance on the postmodern, it is necessary, as Remo Ceserani writes, distinguere fra la postmodernità come etichetta storica inevitabilmente interpretativa – e quindi da discutere – e il postmoderno come adesione ideologica a movimenti culturali o letterari sorti nella stessa condizione – e quindi ancor più da discutere21 (to distinguish between postmodernity as an inevitably interpretable historical label – and thus open to debate – and the postmodern as an ideological adherence to cultural or literary movements of a connected condition – and thus even more debatable). Copyright In addition to his sentiment that both cases are fertile grounds for discussion, the same dual categorical deinitions from Ceserani are usefully brought forward here. he advent of the postmodern condition has been widely disputed according to diferent temporal patterns. We could roughly divide the various positions in this ield into two views, one of which might be labelled the metahistorical, and the other the historico-materialist. According to the metahistorical interpretation, postmodernism would be nothing but the cyclical re-emergence of a mood, or a state of mind, which stresses paradoxes and parodies in periods of crisis and the redeinition of ideas; thus it is one which has no particular historical root. On the other hand, the historico-materialist interpretation reads the coordinates of postmodernity as the late stage of capitalism, and aims to capture the logic of the informational, hyper-technological and global society which progressively took shape ater the end of the reconstruction period during the 1950s. Postmodernism would then be the architectural, artistic, literary, cinematic, etc. response to this historical shit.22 While we situate ourselves within a historico-materialist approach to postmodernity and postmodernism, we are also very conscious of the complexities inherent in such periodizations. In this respect, we share Fredric Jameson’s preoccupation that ‘periodizing hypotheses … tend to obliterate diference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity’ and make use 8 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape of his deinition of postmodernism as a ‘cultural dominant’.23 For this reason, we prefer to see postmodernism as a force ield coexisting within a more complex and intricate set of tensions which characterize late capitalist societies. As Jameson puts it, using Raymond Williams’s categories, postmodernism is the ‘emergent’ cultural category which reacts to other ‘residual’ cultural categories that nonetheless do not cease to exist. he emergence of a postmodern condition would thus not obliterate features of modern or even pre-modern temporalities, which continue to coexist even in postmodernity. he consequence of this, as will be further argued below, is as much the search for entirely new modes of being or of representation as it is the re-appropriation, re-articulation and re-semanticization of models or focal points that belong to residual historical paradigms. he manner in which the relationship between the centre and the periphery is played out in Rome is a key example here. he exposition of such a complex temporal model is necessary in order to undertake the attempt to frame postmodern Rome. If the cohabitation of emergent and residual forms of cultural production is a feature of any object of analysis, this is even more evident and true for Rome, given the multi-layered strata that the course of history has impressed on its cityscape (the church of San Clemente to which Caldwell makes reference is a useful physical embodiment of this; see pp. 57–77). In spite of stereotypical, over-simplistic and homogenizing categories which are usually attached to its idea (from the ‘Eternal City’ to ‘Cloaca Maxima’, from ‘Caput Mundi’ to ‘Modernist Hell’), Rome’s cityscape is a contradictory, ambivalent and dialectical territory where diferent temporalities, styles and forces interweave and clash against each other. In this respect, this investigation inds its point of origin in the attempt to move from the idea of Rome as a classical palimpsest to that of a ‘postmodern palimpsest’. his theoretical notion incorporates styles, shapes and features which go far beyond those that characterize its traditional imagery, and shits its emphasis from the historical traces in the background to the uniied recombination of fragments from the perspective of the present. In its application to the city of Rome in the following essays, the concept of the ‘postmodern’ is dialectical. As much as the term ‘modern’, it is a neutral term which refers to what Althusser deines a ‘structure in dominance’, and thus acquires characteristics which can be considered positive or negative according to the speciic circumstances in which they appear.24 he ‘incomplete’ project of postmodernity has included features which we can decide to support strategically, or to refute. Surely, many would welcome the end of logocentrism, sexual and identitarian normativity and a positivistic and linear notion of history. At the same time, though, there is a risk of accepting blindly the cultural logic of contemporary times, and ending up simply supporting the neo-liberal logic – a logic of exclusion, social hierarchy and class privilege – which is at work in every capitalist society. Copyright Introduction 9 his volume understands Rome as a complex territory where alternative forces cohabit and coexist rather than proposing a singular and total narrative of the city. Across the contributions, Rome presents itself as a city where classical monuments and temples lie alongside modern gas houses; where ancient churches such as San Clemente coexist with contemporary ones such as the Dives in Misericordia in Tor Tre Teste, designed by Richard Meier and inaugurated in 2000; where the city of cinema – Cinecittà – exists side by side with the Vatican; and where museums of classical art share space with museums of twenty-irst century art, such as the Maxxi, designed by Zaha Hadid and inaugurated in 2010. Yet this coexistence is not singularly the topographical cohabitation of diachronic elements conceptualized and designed in diferent epochs, but also and above all the mutation and evolution of meaning that these elements underwent and continue to undergo throughout time. As Marco Cavietti and Filippo Trentin argue in their contributions to this volume, the Aurelian Walls or the Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue are not simply remnants of the classical past to be discovered and understood ‘as it was’; they are signiicant keys to a diagnosis of the way in which diferent eras have dealt with that past. Rather than points on a linear timeline, past and present become axes of intersection in a historical constellation. Together the following essays present Rome not only as a city that is legible within the framework of the postmodern, but moreover as an incubator of postmodernism, and in particular one which extends beyond the national borders of Italy. A key example is the architectural project ‘Roma Interrotta’, the focus of Léa-Catherine Szacka’s essay, in which several architects undertook a double process of de-composition and re-composition of the pre-modern and unitary map of Rome, forcing it into an assemblage of fragments. Richard W. Hayes, in his contribution, argues that the Italian capital’s complex, hyper-stratiied and fragmented cityscape provided the architect Robert Venturi with a prototype for envisioning the postmodern cityscape. In his reading, a strong thread links the scattered and falsiied urban landscape of Las Vegas with that of Rome. For Venturi, Rome’s cityscape represented the antithesis of modernist utopias of urban order such as Paris or New York, and could thus provide anti-totalitarian alternatives to the rigidities of modernist urban planning. he fragmentary and anti-unitary aspect of Rome brings us back to Vidotto’s argument about its ‘precocious postmodernity’. For him: Copyright La Roma del dopoguerra, rimane del tutto estranea all’adozione di un canone, e in questo senso è già paradossalmente e precocemente e, anche se inconsapevolmente, postmoderna. Se una città come Milano può identiicarsi in una cultura imprenditoriale di eicenza e di operosità ino a riprodurre per oltre un secolo un proprio primato e rivendicare gli attributi di capitale morale, a Roma convivono tante culture e tanti modelli diversi.25 10 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape (Post-war Rome came nowhere near the adoption of a canon; in this sense it was already paradoxically and precociously, and even if unknowingly, postmodern. While a city like Milan can be identiied by its entrepreneurial culture of eiciency and industriousness, such that it could maintain a position of leadership for over a century and lay claim to the attributes of moral capital, Rome on the other hand is made of plural coexistent cultures and many diferent models.) In Vidotto’s view, the plurality of Rome that lies at the root of its postmodernity has emerged in part due to the limited success of its modern regeneration. In this discourse, what is quite remarkable is Vidotto’s distinction between Milan – the most ‘modern’ Italian city – and Rome, whose absence of a strong modern project marked the emergence of anti-systematic structures and features. As John David Rhodes also recognizes in his essay in this volume, ‘perhaps Rome, never having been suiciently modern, was already postmodern’. he lack of secondary activities and the limited presence of industrial landmarks, together with the predominance of tertiary activities such as cinema, radio and television productions are the economic structures which put Rome in a privileged position in order to witness and speciically record the postmodern shit. In this regard, it is no surprise that Fabio Benincasa’s essay reads Fellini’s cinematic representation of Rome as the paradigmatic vision of a ‘multilayered, fragmented and substantially abstract’ cityscape. Read in Fellini’s terms, Rome appears at the forefront of the representation of a luid, polymorphous and deconstructed urbanscape, all features which will come to be addressed as intrinsic characteristics of the postmodern city. In Fellini’s ilms, the image of Rome as an organon disintegrates into a fragmented map which inds its unity only in the director’s gaze and montage. As Benincasa writes, ‘Fellini is the author who, departing from the fundamental and unitary iconography of Baroque Rome, irst elaborated the pluralistic city image of our time’. hus, the uniformity of the modernist city that had found in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) its most convincing depiction, inds in Fellini’s multifarious and anti-unitary idea of Rome its symmetrical opposite. Fellini’s snapshot of Rome’s fragmentary and osmotic imagery, and its reliance on the medium of cinema itself is something that should be better considered in order to grasp the contours of Rome’s postmodern narratives. In this respect, we might return to Window Shopping: he Cinema and the Postmodern, in which Anne Friedberg analyses the strict relationship between cinema and postmodernity. Her argument is that cinema and television are key factors that have marked the passage from a modern to a postmodern condition, thanks to their capacity ‘to transform our access to history and memory’ and to produce an ‘increasingly derealized sense of “presence” and identity’. For Friedberg, cinema plays a key role in the process of construction of a ‘decentered’ subjectivity which marks the shit from the modern to the postmodern. As she writes, ‘descriptions of a decentered, derealized, and detemporalized postmodern subject form a Copyright Introduction 11 striking parallel to the subjective consequences of cinema and television spectatorship’.26 It is precisely in this dematerialized and de-realized area of the subject rather than in the emergence of a corporate and iscal economic structure – a process that could be also read as a reaction to fascist dreams of totality based on a unitary and ixed idea of Rome as root of Western civilization – that Rome’s postmodern narratives unravel. he importance of cinematic production for Rome’s economy and the almost obsessive afair between Rome and the cinematic camera – it is not by chance that Rhodes deines postmodern Rome as ‘too imaged, over-represented’ and ‘saturated by representation’ – are the features which appear to mark Rome’s centrality for any discussion on postmodernity and that place the city at the centre of the intersection between high modernism and postmodernism. Osmotic Dislocations, Rome’s Postmodern Narratives he shadow of tradition that, as mentioned, has long been cast over Rome studies, is, unsurprisingly, by no means absent from this volume. In the question of approaches to Italy’s capital, Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape seeks to transcend the ingrained or dichotomic readings of the city that take Eternal Rome as its central and universal foundation. Yet to transcend this speciic tradition is nevertheless to include it, as is repeatedly demonstrated in the essays in this collection: from the not-unfamiliar city centre in Rhodes’s reading of Bernardo Bertolucci’s ilm La luna to the ‘modernist’ postmodernity of the ecclesiastical architecture ater the second Vatican council, described by James Robertson; from the function of the Aurelian Walls as mediator between past and present in Marco Cavietti’s reading, to the constant centre–periphery dialogue in the ilms described by Lesley Caldwell and Fabio Benincasa; from the semantic metamorphosis of monuments and maps in the discussions of Jewell and Trentin and in the ‘Roma Interrotta’ project that is commented on by Szacka, to the surprising mutation of the ‘Eternal City’ into an incubator of postmodern architecture as outlined in Hayes’s essay. For this reason, not only have the contributors each adopted the same osmotic approach to history, modernity and postmodernity outlined above, but moreover the essays have been slotted together in order to have recourse, in a playful way, to the traditions of the city. In the irst section of the volume, ‘Knowing Rome’, the juxtaposed essays ofer a number of speciic perspectives on a historical grounding of the city, that together ofer an approximation of its history. he essay by Marco Cavietti, entitled ‘Between Rome’s Walls: Notes on the Role and Reception of the Aurelian Walls’, takes as its focus the city’s perimeter walls, constructed between ad 270–3 under the rule of Emperor Aurelian. Cavietti treads the history of the walls, illustrating the relection of important social, historical and urban change upon the minor and major mutations of Copyright 12 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape the city perimeter, as well as its symbolic and practical uses. What is perhaps most interesting, though, is how the function of the walls has faded as Rome has sprawled outwards since becoming capital of the Kingdom of Italy: no longer do the walls today denote the limits of the city as they had done for 1,500 years. By focusing on some of the most interesting re-appropriative artistic engagements with the walls in recent years, however, Cavietti argues that they should by no means be let to slip into the realm of a historical shadow, but rather that they are best re-articulated as a threshold, one which could bridge that gap between the tradition of history (the city centre) and the modern or postmodern (the ignored urban expansion). In Cavietti’s piece, the monument thus stands for a fragment of the ‘Eternal City’ that both invokes a very important history within the urban fabric, and yet which has been dislocated from it in such a way that ultimately allows its re-semanticization in a speciic, (but not universal) posmodern position. One of the historical snapshots that Cavietti draws upon is the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, those prototypical guidebooks that were essentially lists of monuments employed by the pilgrim to orient herself in Rome in the Middle Ages. In a striking point that is then re-articulated in the following essay, Cavietti illustrates how these fragmentary lists not only foregrounded the walls as the primary point of orientation, but in fact they (both walls and texts) acted as the concrete punctuation of an imagined map of the city. Fabio Benincasa, in ‘he Explosion of Rome in the Fragments of a Postmodern Iconography: Federico Fellini and the Forma Urbis’, extends this point, suggesting that the skeletal form of the Mirabilia indicated a speciic absence in terms of representation of the city. Likening the guides to further contemporary representations of the city – such as in Francesco Petrarch’s letters – Benincasa posits the dialectical interaction between the concrete and the imagined (such as the monument and the cognitive tour) as the paradigm for the representation of Rome’s urban form. Beginning with a broad outline of the city’s artistic representation in art and literature from this period, Benincasa then traces this interplay of the Italian capital’s presence through to the ilms of Federico Fellini. he author inds the presence–absence dialogue that is characteristic of historical Roman representations throughout Fellini’s career, from the early Lo sceicco bianco through to La dolce vita, Satyricon and Roma. In each case, the weight of tradition is both present and absent, and the overpowering grotesque of Satyricon that literally dissolves from the walls in Roma is highly signiicant here. Nevertheless, Fellini’s representation not only adopts this model of Roman representation, but ultimately comes to mutate it. And Rome does indeed shit, moving from the mappable and knowable (albeit sporadically visited) city to the shadowy, unmappable sprawl of ‘Toby Dammit’ and Roma, ofering us ultimately a further paradigmatic image of a cityscape that anticipates some of the most emblematic depictions of the postmodern city- Copyright Introduction 13 scape, from Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983) to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), from John Carpenter’s Escape rom New York (1981) to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). he theoretical notion of the fragment, so commonly applied to studies of postmodernity, and which Benincasa employs and problematizes historically in his essay, ofers a continued pertinence throughout the volume. In Lesley Caldwell’s ‘Centre, Hinterland and the Articulation of “Roman-ness” in Recent Italian Film’, the fragment appears as an interesting allegory of the geographical and social development of Rome’s peripheries. Continuing pluralistically the historical trajectory of the city begun by Cavietti and brought forward with a greater emphasis on the eighteenth to twentieth centuries by Benincasa, Caldwell provides a socio-historical introduction to the suburbs of Rome from their vast (and oten illegal) expansion from the 1950s to the present. Many of Rome’s borgate (suburbs) appeared as isolated ‘nuclei’ of communities that had been ousted by the sventramenti (demolition) of central Rome during the fascist period, and remained (barely) connected through linear lines to the city centre. Caldwell observes how through time these fragments within the Ager Romanus (the Roman countryside) have continued to be deined, relatedly, according to direct centre–periphery lines. However, as she demonstrates with reference to a series of ilms from the 1990s and 2000s, the connections to the historic centre for the people of Rome have become considerably weakened. In many cases, such as Daniele Vicari’s ilm Velocità massima (Maximum Speed, 2002), the people of Rome exist comfortably, and with little compromise of their ‘Romanness’, outside of Rome’s historical core. Caldwell’s essay thus points to a complex and interesting model in which the very notion of ‘Romanness’ ofers a means to come to terms with the contradictory creation, rupture and re-connection of the city’s fragmented ‘centres’. he second section of the volume, entitled ‘Fragmented Topography’, foregrounds less the historical transition into postmodernity than the speciic manifestations of the period on individual instances of the urban fabric, once again providing a useful juxtaposition of the city and its representations. he speciic cases that are drawn upon – the historical centre, the Ara Pacis museum, the statue of Marcus Aurelius and the Gasometro – nevertheless do signal interesting lines of history and shiting relationships with it. What appears common to each of the essays in this section is the acknowledgment of the bypassing of a paradigm of ‘modern’ Rome, as designated by the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. As, in fact, Jewell and Rhodes have argued elsewhere, Pasolini’s poetry, novels and ilms from the post-war period can be read as a foundational model of Rome that opposes, if not erases the ‘Eternal City’ of Rome, replacing it with the bleak imagery of the fragments of the borgate.27 In the following essays, then, the authors (consciously) transcend once again this Pasolinian model in order to Copyright 14 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape refocus our attention back within the Aurelian Walls, nevertheless paying heed to the re-articulated city centre in light of what lies outside of it. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s La luna (1979), which is the focus of John David Rhodes in the chapter ‘Topophilia and Other Roman Perversions: On Bertolucci’s La luna’, one of the symbols of Pasolini’s Rome remains quite explicit. he ilm’s male protagonist, Joe, stumbles into the Testaccio quarter where a local man attempts to pick him up. As Rhodes observes, this is the area in which Pasolini’s archetypal Roman protagonist, Accattone, dies in the eponymous ilm ater turning to a life of crime; the actor who plays the local in La luna is Sergio Citi, who not coincidentally also played Accattone twenty years earlier. his peripheral encounter thus accounts for much more than a casual nod to Bertolucci’s mentor (the director of La luna assisted Pasolini in the ilming of Accattone). Instead, once Joe has returned to the city centre and his home for the duration of the ilm, the diferentiation from the periphery and the return of focus onto the centre becomes a political and a postmodern shit. he nod to Pasolini in fact its into a broader model of what Rhodes calls Bertolucci’s ‘auto-erotic cinephilia’, in which he layers into the ilm thinly veiled cinematic references to his own work. While this very action has oten led critics to dismiss Bertolucci’s ilm as de-politicized, simplistic and self-obsessed, Rhodes demonstrates how a reading of the easily recognized – when combined into a topographic analysis of the ‘over-familiar’ monuments of Rome’s city centre – returns the political to the ilm and its location. he overemphasis and fetishization of images of the monuments brings with it a further sense of historical confusion: though they belong to entirely diferent historical contexts, and are ‘already lived’ and ‘ater images’, they not only remain present today but do so precisely within that context of postmodern Rome. Where postmodernity in the urban centres of Los Angeles or other typical instances is deined by a sense of the unmappable, Rhodes produces a striking new notion of the postmodern that exists precisely in its own overt ‘know-ability’ and ‘mappability’. he shit back onto the centre, and more speciically the re-semanticization of certain key monuments in the light of their historical signiicance is also the focus of Filippo Trentin’s article, ‘Marcus Aurelius and the Ara Pacis: Notes on the Notion of “Origin” in Contemporary Rome’. His case studies are the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius that sits on the Capitoline Hill, and the new shell and museum of the ancient Ara Pacis Augustae – the altar made in honour of the peacetime brought about by Emperor Augustus – redesigned by Richard Meier and opened in 2006. he historical import of both monuments is painfully apparent, and indeed has caused much controversy in relation to the protective removal of the horse and its replacement with a ‘false’ replica, and to the uncomplementary, ‘international’ style of the museum. Trentin argues, against the grain, that the criticisms aimed at both in terms of the ‘undermining’ Copyright Introduction 15 of history and tradition is problematic, not to mention violent in their denial of the continued interaction and healthy re-interpretation of Rome’s millennia of history. Using fruitful theoretical models such as Michel Foucault’s readings of ‘the origin’, Trentin illustrates how such a denial ultimately ofsets the historical development of the monument’s luid identities. Like Rhodes, Trentin brings his argument back to the question of deining the postmodern in relation to a return to the city centre, thus implicitly accounting for the transcendence of Pasolini’s paradigm. He moreover similarly relates the search for the postmodern between these speciic topographical cases to the dominant urban models, such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Although the Italian capital remains problematic in its centre-led notion of urban space, the simulacrization of history in the statue, which appear highly compatible with the urban performances of Las Vegas, and the deconstructive approach to history of Meier not only ofer profound evidence of Rome’s postmodern turn, but ofer a productive (albeit still problematic) way of grappling with postmodern history. he third essay in this section of the book takes a further fascinating ‘monument’ as its focus: Rome’s gasometro (gas house, or gasometer). Unlike the city centre or various statues, buildings and museums, the gasometer sits slightly awkwardly, ‘suspended’ between its creation not as a classical monument but as a modernist and industrially functioning tool, and its continued presence despite its discontinued use. In ‘A Postmodern Gaze on the Gasometer’, Keala Jewell attempts to interrogate the possibility of attaching postmodernity to the gasometer in relation to its recent iconic status, as triggered by its many artistic representations and alterations. Her mapping of the gasometer from the inter-war and post-war paintings that capture its industrial functions, through its presence within the industrial hub of Ostiense in mid twentieth-century painting and writing (Melli, Vespignani, Moravia and Pasolini) to the re-appropriated cultural symbol in more recent poetry and ilm (such as work by Sara Ventroni and Ferzan Ozpetek), traces a fascinating historical trajectory. Perhaps what is most striking about this alternative monument is how the gasometer, without moving, shits from being peripheral to the city centre to being relatively close, as the city evolves and sprawls beyond it, and at the same time assumes some of the most categorical signs of post-industrial postmodernity. And yet, since this trajectory is now lurching towards its musealization, it remains to be seen quite how the artistic re-engagements with modern Roman history will continue to pan out. From ‘knowing Rome’ in its layered histories according to broad representational outlines and individual monuments discussed in the irst two sections of the book, the inal section, ‘Situating Rome’, begins to re-contextualize the Roman postmodernity according to the global position of the city. Further tensions underlie this section: as mentioned, Rome is by no means a global postmodern city as per the rankings of the Globalization and World Cities Network. Nevertheless, as this introduction and each of the following essays attests, the models of postmodernity Copyright 16 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape that intersect the various strata of Rome both draw from, and inluence, pointedly international people, bodies, theories and urban plans. Given, as Fabio Benincasa observes, that the Roman urban model has been so powerfully inluential in the creation of the imperial status in countless other cities, further tensions and clashes with Rome’s postmodernity on a global level should be of little surprise. he inal three essays in the volume vary in their approach to ‘Situating Rome’: the authors at times focus their analysis on Rome, adopting international perspectives; at other times they focus on the postmodern legacy of the city across the seas. In combination, these three chapters avoid the pitfalls of any linear or simplistic notions of inluence in favour of the pluralism and complexity which we have referred to constantly here. he irst essay, ‘Ecclesiastical Icons: Deining Rome through Architectural Exchange’, by James Robertson, continues the negotiation of the speciic with the broader urban fabric by focusing on the development of churches in the Italian capital following the Second World War. Robertson’s focus is on the churches outside the Aurelian Walls, thus foregrounding a narrative of postmodern Rome that stands in opposition to the dominant city-centre model. Robertson compares important churches such as the Chiesa di Nostra Signora del Santissimo Sacramento e dei Santi Martiri Canadesi, the Basilica di San Giovanni Bosco and the Basilica dei Santi Pietro e Paolo with those constructed by the Glaswegian company Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. By tracing the ‘architectural exchange’ between architects working in the two cities as they burgeon ater 1945, Robertson illustrates the complexity of inluences that are at play even in those aspects of Rome’s architectonics that might be assumed to be fundamentally more traditional. he ‘exchange’ that is at play in Robertson’s chapter is ultimately revealed to go beyond the geographical, including also the temporal and artistic: an exchange between the modern and the postmodern. Not only, as we might have imagined, do certain modernist modes of building work continue to persist beyond Rome’s postmodernity, but in fact, as he illustrates with reference to the Second Vatican Council and its efects on the (concrete) church, the process of postmodern architecture in fact pre-dates the typical chronological coordinates of the shit. Once again, then, Robertson’s article signals the importance of history and of its reinterpretation in the context of Rome. he case of the church of Tor Tre Teste, designed – like the Ara Pacis museum – by Richard Meier, draws together an interesting combination of contemporary aesthetics with Roman traditions, including the ruins of the Ager Romanus and the use of local stone and concrete. As in other contributions to the volume, such as the essays of Jewell and Caldwell, then, the periphery remains an equally important site for the development of Rome’s postmodern aesthetic. he inal two essays in the volume illustrate the importance of Rome in the development of an international, postmodern architecture. Léa-Catherine Szacka’s essay, entitled ‘“Roma Interrotta”: Postmodern Rome as the Source of Fragmented Copyright Introduction 17 Narratives’, contextualizes and comments on the artistic project ‘Roma Interrotta’ (Rome Interrupted), in which twelve international architects dissected, redesigned and re-attached twelve pieces of Giambattista Nolli’s ‘New Map of Rome’ (1748). Richard Hayes’s ‘Las Vegas by Way of Rome: he Eternal City and American Postmodernism’ focuses on two of the most important and popular American postmodern architects, Charles W. Moore and Robert Venturi (the latter of whom was directly involved in the ‘Roma Interrotta’ project). In Szacka’s and Hayes’s essays, the presence of Rome is surprising: in the latter essay, as the author puts it, due to the ongoing clash between Rome’s universality and the postmodern disruption of master narratives; in the former as an apparently unlikely and forced challenge of this historical universality, represented by the Nolli map. Szacka irst employs the ‘Roma Interrotta’ project as an illustration of the re-appropriation of history in the contemporary period that occurs in the twelve frames designed by the architects. he individual segments draw this re-appropriation into twelve fragmented narratives of Rome that not only unite deliberately international perspectives, but do so in a manner that comes to interact directly with the city space (irst Rome, then internationally) in the interactive exhibition of the work. Using the cases of Antoine Grumbach, Léon Krier and James Stirling, Szacka observes the various inluences that are drawn together in the re-envisioning of historical narratives, as well as the ultimate efects that the exhibition on Rome potentially had on the future careers and output of the architects. In the inal essay Hayes re-reads the work of these canonical postmodern architects – both theoretical, such as Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), and practical, such as Moore’s Piazza d’Italia fountain in New Orleans – through the lens of the Italian capital. In the case of the latter, the architectural inluences of Rome and the historical weight of the empire, in particular through Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli, become translated into a monument on the other side of the globe that is both interactive and symbolic, and a dedication to the Italian immigrant populace in New Orleans. Hayes’s reading of these architects powerfully interrupts the typical dismissal of Rome from contemporary thought on postmodernism, not only by tracing the city’s inluence and heritage, but moreover by illustrating how the two architects destabilize the hegemony of ‘Roma Eterna’. In the citation of Robert Venturi from which Hayes draws the title of his essay, the architect describes the movement between Rome and Las Vegas as one which alters his vision of the city: ‘[it] is the Rome of evolving juxtapositions – of eternal incompleteness. It is a Rome acknowledging evolutions of many kinds and juxtaposing contexts of many kinds, a Rome that is never complete’.28 hough this is the romanticized and fond account which pays testament to the inluence of the city on just one architect, his repeated stress on the incompleteness of the city, as well as the contrasts and combinations of its various, mutating Copyright 18 Rome, Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape juxtapositions is something to which this chapter, as well as each of the contributions to this volume, attest. Happily, they draw together a vast range of approaches to the speciic and the general in the case of Rome, producing insight on a series of crucial questions about the centre and periphery, the local and the international, the plurality of representations of the city, and the unavoidable weight of history; questions which are only part resolved, yet which we hope will trigger further thought and discussion in the application of postmodernity to this incomplete Rome. We recognize that this volume is by no means exhaustive and that its absences point to the work which is still to be done in this fertile ield of postmodern Rome studies. he chapters here merely signal certain major questions which remain unanswered, such as the relationship between race, gender and sexuality and the politics of space. It is our hope that the volume helps to clear away some of the detritus of the pompous and magniloquent imagery of Rome, in order to open it up to other potential meanings. he signiier ‘Rome’ should, in the future, include in its semantic ield typically ignored features and characters: Ostiense, with its slaughterhouse converted into a museum for contemporary art (the Macro Ostiense), its power plant transformed into a gallery for ancient art (Centrale Montemartini), its train hub re-thought as a food mall (Eataly). Rome should mean that commercial and residential citadel which is Parco Leonardo and the scattered urbanscape located outside the physical limits of the actual city; the multicultural Piazza Vittorio, with its markets, its small shops and its ethnic restaurants; Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, the seat of the irst Roman gay street, where everyday lesbian, gay and transsexual people gather.29 he existence of these Roman presences should create together a breach in the image of the ‘Eternal City’, they should deconstruct its tradition, absorb a diferent temporality, propose a more osmotic notion of history in which a certain reading of the past no longer governs the present. Rome’s postmodern narratives must replace a ixed and established notion of the city in order to re-think the cityscape of the future. Copyright