Talking about the outskirts of Rome, especially the Tuscolano quarter, means recalling how people lived in the sixties and seventies, that is recalling life in a territory which is irrevocably lost together with its different "lingoes", first grouped together without any rules, though strongly contrasting one with another, then united and amalgamated by time into one sound. A sound able to communicate which recalled the attention of the post-rationalist university intelligentia, inspiring it to visit and study the most interesting urban quarters in Europe.
At the end of the Second World War, besides Cesira and a Maddalena, Giulio and Nando met Pasolini, Moravia, Bertolucci, Tafuri, Secchi, Adriana Asti, Adele Cambria and Elsa Morante; all on one strip of land which joined the Tuscolana area to the city with the shacks of Mandrione, stretching as as far as Porta Maggiore.
All united to understand, or try to understand, how one should and could change the world reading the dreams of those who had strenuously lived through the war. Tthat is, those who had memries of the black market, of police round ups, a shortages of food for their children, of the Resistance, or the pride of belonging to the Fascist Party.
A strip of poor street but rich in history which politics wished to hide for reasons of speculation. A street which behind ruins and copses might hide authentic jewels of human art like, for example, the sanatorio del Ramazzini, a page of resistence history chose not to read.
This zone became city quickly,too quickly, joining violently marginal areas with directional centres.
In all this a coming and going of "gypsies, prostitutes and thieves" (definition still applied to Mandrione) came into existence , between the aerport of Centocelle and the Parco degli Acquadotti. It was a city within a city where it was possible to write the best Italian film scripts, where famous actors and scenographers lived together in a pictured ambience , and where history was forgotten.
A second class Italian Hollywood able to upset the bigotted middle class, induced to burn kilometres of film said to be obscene and blasphemous.The same middle class which took many film Directors and authors to court.
In this territory, only the games of boys -- shared in by everyone -- without distinction of social class -- preserved, for a relatively long period -- a heterogeneous community, deriving from all parts of Italy. It was just these boys, socially and culturally different one from another, who brought down the remains of the re-actionary and popularist culture then in power On the new outskirts, where the schools in the basements of Piazza Quinto Curzio, Via Lemonia, Via Lepido, the boys of Tuscolano lived, communicating by mixing their orginal dialect with Roman dialect for them ,still little known, and repeated more in imitation than from direct experience. The Parco degli Acquadotti, or, better, "la pinetta" as the "freaks" of the quarter call it, is the centre of this territory, while the dump on the slopes of the Villa delle Vinacce is the football pitch for matches without rules.
Then the uninterrupted cornfields between the Park of Torrespaccata, the afternoons are given to making cicoria to sell in the market of PiazzaVittorio, Alberone or St Giovanni.This boundary area becomes a meeting place. New friendships are made, and film shots are taken for Cinecittā, perched along the circiut walls. Or you go to see the first football pitch organised with rules, on a pitch within a commercial centre.
Often, in return for small payments of money or simply a drink at the bar, friendships serve to steal or destroy testimonies of ancient Rome which is help up by building speculation. So, in a few hours, are destroyed the most beautiful (so they say who have seen them) mosaics of swimming pools of Torrespaccata, Appio Claudio, Via Lemonia, Don Bosco. The immense underground network of Torre Spaccata is damaged, Cecafumo, Quadraro and Tor Fiscale; and drinking troughs of animals on the territory disappear, with the exception of one within the grounds of a golf course.
In all this loss of signs of memory there emerges a modern city as described by Pasolini in "La ricotta" (episode in the film ROGOPAG)" . ancient ruins whose history and style non-one any longer understands and, on the together hand absurd modern constructions which by now everyone understands".
Around these ruins a dialect literature, marginalised and confined in the ridiculous, and a silence on the part of those who have lived the recent past made of violence and abuse which to us is incomprehensible. Only around the eighties thanks to the stubbornness of a teacher of the Istituto Moneta was an act of Nazi reprisal brought to light -- a fascist round-up of the Quadrato when hundreds of males were deported to Germany. The revenge of a marginalised people, the "wasps nest", which with difficulty acquired a role in history.. To the people of Quadrato one takes off one's hat, but it is a partial and momentary respect too full of fine distinctions, especially towards the young.
P. P; Pasolini who loved this people "fascist and devoid of class consciousness ", and in the introduction to the film "Mamma Roma" describes it like this: " and in the middle of the field of brown coloured ruins, chips on a hump of land.. In the background of an acquaduct encrusted with huts and hovels, these ruins rear up their surviving forms : half arches, memories of arches, crumbs of arches . the countryside of Hector advances with laziness.
Sunday leisure in this countryside which goes to see those who . play on the playing fields of sacred water , near Caracalla or on the Appia Antica. " Slowly the meeting places begin to disappear, in the space of a few years all the farms disappear, the small inns, the bars with tables in the open; the piazzas transform themselves into places for walking commerce, pilgrimages, midway between sacred and profane, typical of the Roman tradition that are sadly reduced . The habit of going walking out on Sunday into the fields of Tuscolano and Centocelle is transformed into an individual rite. More and more rare grow the trips to Ostia to the mythical "Victoria" or "Kursal". But there are boys that rebel, occupying themselves prepotently the piazzas of the quarter with political slogans. They find ample space in Piazza dei Consoli, dei Tribuni and the metaphysical Piazza Don Bosco. Youth committees of the Manifesto meet here, etc; Sections not only of the experimental party, moments of great sociality, not by chance here is inaugurated the first self-managed social centre.
The multiculturality of the Tucolo area here has the space necessary for demonstrations, clashing with a world of adults that does not want to know, that is not interested in understanding. Also, the Parco degli Acquadotti assumes a new social form, here on Saturday and Sunday conjurers appear, and in the 70's this will become a place of experimentation, with the first timid street theatre welcoming its first spectators.. Here people meet to dance, festas are organised carrying from home things to eat. This contrasts with catholic propriety, and women acquire a dominant role.
Only the women's movement in the 70's will render them officially protagonists of history taking them into the piazza to campaign against clandestine abortions , violence in the home, exploitation economy, etc.
In the meantime people continue to play with statuettes, at battimuro, using as money pearls of plastic in the shape of the letter S which boys use to dress up like New York rappers; some play cards using childen's comics as money.
The approach to the outside world is anything but "green," atrocious suffering is inflicted on animals , the public heritage is devastated.
Yet the territory, this territory, is conquered territory, of arrogance, physical and carnal violence.
When the drama of Jack Lametta happens in the 80's the finger will be pointed immediately at the drop outs and inhabitants of Quadrato for the deterioration that there reigns.
And it is also true that in some quarters with some gangs of youths civilised life is certainly not a high priority. We are, rather, on the verge of ungovernability, they are proud of the trouble they can cause. .
In this context it almost seems a merit to belong to this or that zone.
The crisis of identity is also the cultural crisis that advances . People are diffident about printed bank notes, one lives the difference and idenity of social groups; these people do not recognise themselves in the journalistic article which talks about them. Also the new political world is slow to understand. Their presence is considered a nuisance, no-one wishes to be seen as some-one different from others.
When, however, in the 70's the fascists attempt to publicise their presence in the quarter, this will be rejected with determination by the inhabitants of the outskirts who go back home in silence.
In my opinion, it is in a scene from the film of Renato Castellani, "Nella cittā l'inferno", that we find the synthesis of the philosophy of the people of the outskirts: the actress Anna Magnani, after calling the attention of journbalists to a detainee explaining that she has changed her way of life, she stops them photographing her, so she would not come back to those places; the thanks her who had come to her defence and come to give her a kiss, with an irritated "you fool", tearing her hair.
What they dreamed ,the young boys of Tuscolano, and what they still dream, we cannot guess. But there is no doubt that if their world, which is my world, is in being reconstructecd a small boat, in which we first taste sex , split the booty of petty thefts then their, and my, emarginalisation was and still is a sacrificial act.
