Rome Eternal

The City as Fatherland

Guy Lanoue

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351550598
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What does 'Roman' mean? How does the mythical city touch people's identities, values and attitudes? In the long-established and official imaginary of the West, Rome is the citta dell'arte, the city of faith, an heirloom city inspired by the traces of ancient Empire, by the brooding aura of the Church, by Hollywood fairy-tale romance, and by the spicy tang of veiled decadence. But what of its contemporary residents? Are they now merely guides and waiters servicing throngs of tourists indifferent to the city's contemporary charms? Guy Lanoue, a former resident of Rome, explores how Romans live the modern myth of Rome Eternal. Since the 19th century, it has defined an important community, the fatherland, a home-spun society where the rules of everyday life become 'tradition': ways of eating, dressing, making and keeping friends and acquaintances, 'proper' ways of speaking and a hard to define but nonetheless tangible air of composure. Guy Lanoue is a Professor of Anthropology at the Universite de Montreal.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: ‘Rome Is My Fatherland’

This book is about Rome as a symbol that inspired the emergence of a certain local way of being Roman and especially of being well bred, of embodying civiltà, civilized life. Symbols and practices that surround this label have come to embody certain aspects of social order not only in Rome but, to a certain extent, in the entire country. I focus on one class, the old Roman bourgeoisie (alta borghesia, vecchia borghesia; ‘high’ or ‘old’ bourgeoisie), and how it used its unique ties to and special knowledge of Rome — an older, pre-Unification Rome and its ‘insider’ histories — to embody a model of allegedly traditional values. In the era of the Popes, they performed the work that helped build the myth of Rome Eternal.¹ After, they rebranded Rome as a fatherland. Their position gained traction because of the cultural upheavals of the Fascist epoch and the resulting black hole in official memory so large that it reduced post-war public discourse to a squeaky, sycophantic falsetto incapable of describing the embedded political corruption that fuelled Italy’s economic recovery. The bourgeoisie’s manners and attitudes — essere perbene, being well bred — gives all Italians a way of symbolically circumventing the corruption of Rome as the capital of an ailing country that has failed to live up to the promise embodied in the glories of its arts and in its tradition of civiltà. Because of Rome’s national pre-eminence, this small and otherwise obscure class symbolizes a Rome (of the many Romes that coexist in the cityscape), Rome as the fatherland of values that frame an idealized but nonetheless practical framework for individual ethics and for social interaction.

Demographically insignificant, this old bourgeoisie embodies a form of resistance to nation-building that, were it anywhere but Rome, would have few repercussions, if any. Rome, however, was and is a symbol for all Italians, and bourgeois reinvention and rebranding of tradition redefined the Roman fatherland as a new space filled with old symbols that could act as a rallying point for resistance, an anti-State for anyone who was dissatisfied with the new nation. In Italy, where the national pastime is criticizing the government, this is a lot of people. There are other reasons for the survival of a notion of ‘tradition’, of course, but attempts since the birth of Italy to impose a rational, modern national culture have often led to oppressive or non-functional institutions that encourage people to invent or to cherish existing alternatives. ‘Tradition’ is thus not only the source of a State-sponsored identity more or less aimed at keeping the populace in line; it is also seen as a potential homeland for the oppressed, the marginal, the dissatisfied.

The result of these conflicting visions is a country that has always seemed on the brink of moral and political disaster. Both sides build upon the same cultural foundation but each proposes different designs for the façade, especially of one trope, the most potent, and the only one whose name resonates across centuries and political boundaries: Rome. Other culture wars may come and go, but this one, which pits nation against fatherland, the formal against the intimate, the modern against tradition, rationality against values, is unique.

This is no soon to be forgotten ideological squabble. Though each is built with more or less the same bricks and mortar, these two communities call into question ways of living and of being. Rome Eternal is above all a voice in the imaginary of the possible, of the mythified pax Romana that the Catholic Church claimed as its own after ancient Rome’s downfall but was never able to implement. Measured against this failed utopia, Rome is also a symbol of cultural inertia, of political failure and, above all, of the death and decay of this and of all dreams.

Here, I try to see Rome through its old bourgeoisie, whose relationship to the city in a very real sense embodies an important aspect of ‘time-full’ Rome, Rome as a local fatherland, the idealized image of Rome Eternal as a symbolic community tied to traditions of civiltà, civilized values. Members of this class are undeniably ‘Roman’, so seeing the city through their eyes gives us an insider view of the city, of its symbolism, of the workings of its human engine. There is a narrative paradox involved: to understand them, one must know Rome; to know something about contemporary Rome, one must know the old bourgeoisie. I look at both subjects, since they are inextricably though subtly linked. The first part of this book is historical and general, painting a limited picture of Rome as a canvas on which the old bourgeoisie, as we shall see in later chapters, created a new image of itself, of the fatherland, and of the past. The divisions are not so clear cut, however. The old bourgeoisie is a subject but it is also a guide to how the contemporary myth of Rome Eternal emerged.

In Rome, various dynamics of place and time intersect in the ‘black’, ‘old’ or ‘high’ bourgeoisie more than any other, for many reasons, not the least of which is that it makes explicit claims to embody the ‘time-full’ aspects of the Rome Eternal. Today, there are thousands of people who can claim this label, so reconstructing individual genealogies to establish origins is almost impossible.² Most Romans agree that the old bourgeoisie is more or less the descendants of the people who worked for the popes before Unification. Unlike most European countries, Rome never had an entrenched aristocracy. For the thousand-year existence of the Papal States each newly elected pope appointed new aristocrats whose moral and political power was in the long run limited by time: after the death of a pope, there was no guarantee that the next would be from the same family or clan. Appointees and families naturally fought bitterly for control of the Holy See at every opportunity. In contrast, the old bourgeoisie was a stable element in Rome’s tumultuous politics, especially in the confusing decades preceding Unification.

Paradoxically, given their uniquely Roman traits, the history of the old bourgeoisie has always been linked to events outside Rome. Towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, German Romanticism and French-inspired Liberalism everywhere threatened established regimes. The Popes, especially Pius VI Braschi (d. 1799) and some of his successors Pius VII (d. 1823) and Leo XII (d. 1829) responded by launching a series of modernizing initiatives to shore up their power; for example, draining the Pontine Marshes (Agro Pontino) southwest of the city; creating new (but few) factories; ‘selling’ the image of Rome by favouring tourism, sponsoring the arts, and so on. These were the first acts in a long series of events, including the French occupation of Rome (beginning in 1798; Pius VI in fact died in exile in France). While these events threatened the status quo, they also led to new social, economic and, later, political opportunities for some people. From this maelstrom, new classes and new power bases emerged in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. One of these was a bourgeoisie that was closely affiliated with the papal administration.

Rome’s old bourgeoisie were not bourgeois in any usual sense of the word, since they had no investments and no capital,³ but they had and continue to have considerable symbolic power. In terms of the complex history of Roman symbolism, their role in embodying the semiotic qualities of contemporary Rome far outweighs their limited political and financial power. They are, in a sense, the hidden protagonists of a city already celebrated for its ancient ruins, its decadent pseudo-aristocrats, its tough underclass, its politicized proletariat. Theirs is a story that has not been told, even though they are key players in the semiotics of Rome Eternal.

In other countries, in other cities, various elites try to mould a place in their image or in the image of their values, which is why we can speak of ‘Stalinist’ architecture in Moscow and the ‘bourgeois’ tone of Paris. Rome Eternal resists transformations of the Rome urbs, however. In practical terms, this means people are more likely to commit to values that seem timeless, unchanging and universal. To a certain extent, this is true everywhere: popes and presidents who become ‘pontifical’ and ‘presidential’ exercise more power than those with limited abilities to embody the tropes of power. The same is true of the Roman bourgeoisie: their influence derives from their ability to embody Rome Eternal, to plug into its metaphors and metonyms while remaining sufficiently distant from the State and from some aspects of modern life. The benefits are a tremendous increase in symbolic wealth and status but very little increase in material wealth or political power.

This class developed a very complex rapport with the city after the Vatican lost its secular power, when the nascent Italian state annexed the Papal States in 1870. Inevitably, their ties to Rome’s symbolic power, which they now desperately needed after being cast adrift by their old papal patrons and shunned by the new State, became a two-way street. The more they interpreted and embodied Rome’s ‘culture’, the more they came to imbue the trope of Rome Eternal with the very traits they claimed for themselves. The ephemeral and almost mythical quality of the identity they created by claiming to embody the values of ‘old’ Rome became an important part of Roman imagery. For over one hundred years they have been at war with the ideologues of post-1870 governments, who championed il popolo, ‘the people’, as the heroes and protagonists of an imaginary revolution against Vatican domination. The popolo, according to certain official mythologies, was the ‘real’ embodiment of Rome.⁴ Strangely, in one sense the shunned ‘high’ bourgeoisie eventually emerged more or less victorious, since, in a class-based society such as Italy where class boundaries⁵ are in fact reinforced by the not-so-secret cabals that more or less run the country, claims of ‘high’ bourgeois status that developed from the symbolic appropriation of Rome are envied, copied, interpreted, even parodied or rejected, but never ignored. This does not mean people dismiss official histories of the allegedly democratic popolo and of their (allegedly) working-class culture but neither are they indifferent to bourgeois claims of being the arbiters and embodiment of the perbene (bon ton) of the virtual homeland, the fatherland, that acts as the ‘real’ counterweight to official narratives of power.

This is the story of Rome as la patria, the fatherland, in the hearts of many Romans, new and old. It is a story of another Rome, the Rome that speaks quietly to Romans in the zones of silence where a normally ‘noisy’ State cannot intrude and where the official myth of Rome Eternal only whispers its culture of the intimate, civiltà. This is not the Rome of tourist guidebooks (e.g., Guidoni 1984), nor is it the Rome of history books, although these other Romes are built with many of the same building blocks. The Rome I try to describe here is akin to the cultural intimacy of modern States so ably described by Herzfeld (1997). This is not, however, the ‘dirty laundry’ he describes, the shameful skeleton in the closet that unites everyone in a vow of silence, shame and secret pride, but the Rome of patria, the fatherland, the anti-State governed by the conventions of civiltà that becomes the refuge of rich and poor alike united by their opposition to State intrusiveness, appalled by its inefficiencies and injustices, or simply ignored and marginalized by power politics.

Because this book is about contemporary Rome and its myth of Rome Eternal, it deals with the ways in which the present shifts meanings of the past. Our starting point is the turn of the nineteenth century. After several centuries of sparring, two cultural regimes finally collided, the Church against modern European nationstates in the form of the Romantics and idealists of the Young Italy movement of the 1830s, ’40s and ’50s, which the Piedmontesi would use as a smokescreen and as a launch pad for their takeover and construction of Italy. The contradictory blend of northern European, Liberal and Romantic ideas of modernity with Bismarckianstyle policies based on blood and iron did lead to the founding of Italy in 1861 and the conquest of Rome in 1870. The final battle, however, was not resolved, despite the insistence in standard historiography that Rome was ‘conquered’. Militarily, yes; as an icon, the city still bears the scars of this unfinished struggle. Given its signification in western thought, post-Unification Rome became the laboratory where national governments were determined to fashion Italy and Italians, where they had to succeed unequivocally if there was to be a future for the new country and, perhaps, for themselves.⁶ Perhaps it succeeded; there is no doubt that an Italian national consciousness exists today. But perhaps it failed, since so much of this shared awareness of being Italian depends on opposition and on tension (Herzfeld 2014: 36) between North and South, between nation and fatherland, between Church and State, between idealism and pragmatism, between the popolo and secret cabals of power. Even those like Quintino Sella,⁷ scientist and Finance Minister in the 1860s and early ’70s, who grasped the symbolic importance of Rome for uniting the country, did not foresee the consequences of trying to transform the west’s most durable yet most chameleon-like symbol.

Rome’s paradoxes are what give its symbolic apparatus its strength and longevity. Normally, myths simplify and ritualize many aspects of reality by suggesting metaphoric equivalencies between its elements, so that their building blocks can be grouped into several unifying semantic bundles; ‘messy’ reality is, in myth, ‘really’ a statement that claims to resolve the tension between X or Y. In other words, myths simplify and transform lived reality to give it a meaning people can grasp, as much as it explores the undoable, the unsayable, and even the unthinkable. Mythical simplification sometimes obliges myths to break the normal rules of temporal causality; mythical protagonists are not constrained by linear cause and effect relationships. Rome as a trope, however, seems to work in the opposite way, by being more complex than the reality to which it is allegedly anchored. It still embodies a utopian notion of paradise, a mythified vision of absolute Imperial power, a false image of longevity and inertia, though none of these elements is or was true. The myth of Rome Eternal can thus refer to any evolving lived reality and absorb it; in effect, its extreme time depth defines its mythic structure and makes it more complex than the phenomenal reality it purports to represent.

For example, ‘Roman’ means living in a neighbourhood where nearly every building, street, public square, church and stone has a meaning that impregnates people’s identities in very immediate ways: where one takes one’s morning coffee, buys the paper, shops at particular stalls at the market, sits at one’s table in the local trattoria — these services are all owned, operated and offered by people who expect that the strength and intimacy of a relationship depend on its longevity.⁸ It may seem paradoxical in a city with such an overpowering history and weighty symbolic apparatus, but communities and networks in Rome are built from the ground up over time, perhaps as an antidote to the many symbolic nuances in its official history that have allowed popes and presidents to exercise authority, often to the detriment of the less powerful. The more politicians, ideologues, writers and others have enriched Rome’s official history, the more people seem determined to develop their own narratives. This, as we shall see, feeds into Roman definitions of the fatherland, built more on notions of civiltà than place.

Methodological Issues

What I am trying to describe is not a recognizable set of measurable social phenomena, such as a statistical aggregate (for example, ‘in the village, thirty-five percent of households have gardens that are immediately adjacent to their houses’), nor a set of individual behaviours that can be attributed to a shared and easily recognizable marker of identity (for example, ‘in January, the people of the Eagle clan hosted the Wolf clan in a potlatch’), but something that exists only as a series of overlapping and not overly coherent representations that motivate, inform and politicize individual patterns of behaviour. These are almost indistinguishable from the patterns motivated, informed and politicized by other representations attached to other class markers. These representations are called culture by some anthropologists, although I think it is misleading to oppose them to society. Representations of the social are so thoroughly embedded in the practices to which they refer that we would be wise to think of culture and the social as a series of practices, some of which are directly manifested in observable behaviour and others in exercises in the imaginary.

Most anthropological research is done relatively ‘cold’, with anthropologists arriving at their research sites with general but second-hand knowledge. In contrast, I lived in Rome for many years before deciding to write this book. There were two challenges: one was my relatively ephemeral subject, the unofficial past and its relation to the official present, and the other was finding the bourgeoisie, who seemed to have a very high status in a very ephemeral community. The more I became involved in my research, the more it was obvious that the bourgeoisie and its culture were more guides to the unofficial past and its importance in a special community than a subject as such. They did not fit into the usual categories I had studied to date: a marginal group, or people living in a poor neighbourhood, or a class identified by money and power. All they had was status, but in what community?

I therefore consulted textbooks on methodology. Although these contained good advice, none dealt with the problems I faced: I was trying to deconstruct Rome as a trope, but I decided it was impossible to talk to a precise cross section of Romans. I could never construct an adequate survey to give voice to my subjects — in the jargon of these books on methodology — without first identifying the boundaries and make-up of the subject itself, Rome Eternal. Clearly, a survey of this Rome was not possible, given its social and historical complexity.

It soon became apparent there were other potential problems. Briefly stated, as much as anthropological research implies some degree of closeness with people, it is a somewhat artificial intimacy created by an underlying distance, like two strangers on a plane confiding details of their personal lives because they know they will never see each other again. The intimacy that is at the heart of fieldwork always has limits, since it is seen by many anthropologists as a purely emotional and therefore ephemeral quality, somewhat like transference in a psychiatrist’s office. One goes away, one returns to more familiar surroundings, one sees friends and family ‘at home’, and this ‘other’ intimacy subsides, in many cases, to a warm glow, a strong and perhaps heartfelt memory, but clearly delimited by time and space. The intimacy that was constructed in the field is not expected to last; it is not friendship, no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: ‘Rome Is My Fatherland’
• 2 One Home, Many Romes
• 3 Public and Private, Formal and Informal: From Power to Status
• 4 The Vatican and Rome: From Myth to Politics
• 5 Building the Mythical Landscape: From Politics to History
• 6 Building the City: From Myth to Space
• 7 Building the Patria after Unification: From Myth to Culture
• 8 Being Well-Bred in a ‘Time-full’ Place: From Culture to Myth
• 9 Mussolini’s Gifts: From Politics to Rhetoric
• 10 Somatizing Rome Eternal: From Myth to the Body
• 11 Recent Changes
• Bibliography
• Index