In Context

Rob Redman, founder of The Fiction Desk, has been asked to guest edit this month's blog for Context Travel, a 'network of architects, historians, art historians, and other specialists who organize over 300 different walks in 15 cities around the world', including Rome. He's exploring the relationship between travel and literature and he asked me if I'd like to talk about my experiences as an expatriate author. I was delighted. You can see what I said here.

The Pantheon (illustrated left) isn't mentioned in the article and doesn't feature in any of my fiction either. Which is odd, because it's my favourite building.

Rome launch

Well, Any Human Face is now officially launched in its home city of Rome, in the Trastevere studio of Paola Casalino, just round the corner from the setting of the first chapter and a five minute walk from Andrew Caruso's first cold-water garret. I had a wonderful time and I hope everyone else did. You can see some photos of the event, taken by my friend Maika, here. I'll be posting a short film very soon...

Rome launch

If you're anywhere near Vicolo dell'Atleta, Trastevere, at 6.30 on 27 May, come along to the Rome launch of Any Human Face. I'll be there!

Writing in Rome

If you'd like to spend a month in Rome this summer, before the weather gets too hot, and want to flex your writing muscles at the same time, you might like to consider signing up for the Summer Institute Creative Writing and Literary Translation, run by John Cabot University. Mark Strand and Booker-shortlisted Simon Mawer are, respectively, the Poet and Novelist in Residence, and I'll be running the fiction workshop. Just click on the link for more information.

Now is the time to cover your face

To what appears to be general indifference, the press room in Rome city hall has just been dedicated to Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist who died three years ago in Florence after having spent many years in the States. Those of you who've never glanced inside any of the last few books Fallaci wrote, in Italian and an execrable English, will have no idea of the level of irrational venom to which her anti-Islamic polemic sank. Together, they redefine the notion of racist vomit with an energy that would impress the KKK were its members capable of extended reading. They're a sort of cross between Ann Coulter at her worst and the most virulently xenophobic taxi-driver you've ever had the misfortune to be picked up by. Fallaci's no doubt sincere hatred, and self-aggrandising hate-mongering, were fuelled by the way Muslims smell (that's right - bad) to the fact that they 'breed like rats'. Heady stuff, and much of it went down a bomb - if that isn't too inflammatory a metaphor - in the new Italy, characterised by Umberto 'Bingo Bongo' Bossi, but to name a room after her in the city hall of Italy's capital is an odd choice and I'm surprised no one seems to mind. After all, the (ex-fascist) mayor's recent rubber stamping of the appointment of someone who served time for an act of right-wing political violence some decades ago has stirred up enough controversy, although it's blindingly obvious that, of the two, Fallaci is by far the more dangerous figure. The fact that she was a writer and journalist of some note, and even value, before losing her marbles a là Bardot is no excuse.

On a lower level, if that were possible, one of Italy's least loveable

politicians, a woman called Daniela Santanché, was just on the TV news. Santanché's political career, such as it is, has been devoted to running to the succour of the victor, but that's hardly remarkable in Italy, although running with such speed on the very high heels she favours shows an admirable

recklessness. She's managed to get herself, she claims, slightly roughed up by protesting against the use of the burkha outside a party celebrating the end of Ramadan. Wisely, she'd informed the press that she'd be there, because what use is a protest without profile? She quoted a 1975 law forbidding the concealing of the face, insisting it be enforced. What was amusing was that, between her enormous sunglasses and surgically puffed-up lips, it was hard to imagine what her own face must once have looked like. Perhaps the law should be extended to cover designer shades and trout pout.

Pride

You may be wondering why I haven't posted photographs of Saturday's Pride in Rome. Well, it's simple. I was visiting my mother in England and had muddled up the dates. (How gay is that?) But I have it on good authority (Peter's) that it went off well, despite the shameful 'confusion' about route, only sorted out four days before the event. The photograph in the national section of Repubblica shows a rather fetching young man in loincloth and stigmata and presumably refers to some archaic gay ritual I haven't come across in my extensive reading. Others, better informed, are shocked. There's the usual confusion about numbers: 300,000 according to the organisers, two old queens and a poodle according to the police. Whether it served its purpose, assuming one knew what that was, I don't know, but I'm sorry I missed it. Still, I've been through the snaps I posted from last year's event and that of 2007 and thought I'd revive a few favourites. Here they are.

Here we go again

Last year, for the most absurd reasons (a choral recital in a nearby building, if I remember rightly), under evident pressure from the Vatican and the post-fascist mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, Rome Gay Pride was denied the use of Piazza San Giovanni. The mean-spirited sods are trying it on again this year, eleven days before the march is due to take place, in an attempt to effectively cancel the event. I've been asked to pass this message on to you by the SUPPORT ROMA PRIDE 2009, and that's what I'm doing. If you don't want Rome to look like Moscow or Tehran, you know what to do. And if you're on Facebook, you can join up here. 

Dear friends,

As some of you already know the 13th of June is the date of Roma Pride 2009, but at the moment, only ten days before the event, we still have no authorized route for the final parade and march. Yesterday the police autorities again denied authorization, for the third time, with reasons that are no more than absurd excuses.

As well as the usual Pride issues, such as visibility, rights, non discrimination and equality for LGBT people and communities, we face a conservative attack on basic democratic and civil rights, as guaranteed by the Italian Constitution and the international conventions. Again Piazza San Giovanni has been denied because of the veto of the Vatican and clerical authorities. However, last year's route from Piazza della Repubblica to Piazza Navona has also been denied this year, making it almost impossible the march to take place, and damaging the democratic and civil rights of all Italian citizens, not just GLBT people.

We really need moral support from all of you, and from abroad.You can support Roma Pride 2009 by writing your personal or associative support to romapride@gmail.com (you can send a copy also to me at a.maccarrone@mariomieli.org), by spreading and forwarding this message to other people, above all other groups or associations, GLBT groups, Pride organisers, activists for civil and human rights, politicians, journalists that may be interested in this topic, and by creating mobilization or any other kind of useful iniative at any level.
If you are a journalist or have web sites, blogs, newsletters or acces to any other media, please help us byspreading this information.

Thank you for your support and help,

Andrea Maccarrone

A maid looking through the keyhole

There's a lovely piece by Peter Popham in today's Independent about the background to Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Here's an extract from it, with an interesting observation on how artists - some artists - gather their material: 

The film caused a huge scandal when it came out, and narrowly avoided being banned. At the premiere, one outraged signora spat in the director's face. "We were furious with him," says Olghina, "because it wasn't a decadent city. Fellini, who comes from Rimini, based the film on gossip. He wasn't yet part of the city's life – he was like a maid looking through the keyhole." Yet no one denies that Fellini crystallised an amazing vision of Rome.

Tengo famiglia (2)

I had occasion to write about nepotism in Rome's first and largest university, La Sapienza, almost a year ago, when investigations were being conducted into the university's dean, Renato Guarini, and some confusion about a nine-million-euro tender for an underground car park and his daughter's university career. You can find the details here. At the end of the post, I commented:

The cherry on the cake? The deputy dean and head of the faculty of medicine, a certain Luigi Frati, whose votes were decisive in Guarini's election as dean, has also been investigated for nepotism. His wife and two children all work, you guessed it, in his faculty.

That was last October. Now, as elections for a new dean come to their close, Dr Luigi Frati has emerged as the winner with 53% of the vote. An article in today's la Repubblica (I can't find a link for it) adds some piquant new details to his family's academic career. For example, his wife, now full professor in the medicine faculty, used to teach literature in high school. Well, let's be generous. A lot of writers have been doctors. Maybe she does courses on Chekhov ('Medicine is my lawful wife.'). Or on Italo Svevo and substance addiction. Frati's daughter, also a full professor in papà's faculty, has a degree not in medicine but in law. OK, we all watch CSI. Maybe she has the seat in Horatio Crane studies. Or maybe, just maybe, she's benefited from the oldest career structure in Italy, otherwise known as nepotism. 

I'm sure you know that nepotism comes from the Italian word nipote (indicating niece/nephew or grandchild) and that it was used to describe the way popes promoted their illegitimate children. These days, in Italian universities, they don't have to be illegitimate or even children - practically any family member or hanger-on can expect to get a leg up onto a chair of one sort or another, regardless of faculty. It's not as though anyone expects them to actually do anything. Italian universities are probably unique in the free world for their failure to measure themselves against other universities, whether in Italy or abroad. Italian universities were evaulated at national level, using internationally recognised and objective criteria, for the first and, so far, only time in 2006. This evaluation would make interesting reading if it were published but that hasn't happened. Clearly, the experience was so dispiriting for the Italian academic world that it's unlikely to be repeated in the near future. 

In the meantime, Frati's family are ben sistemati. And they aren't alone. Forty percent of university teachers in Messina share a first name and surname with teachers in some other university in the region. In Naples, the percentage is around 35. In Rome, it's slightly over 30. These people aren't all necessarily related but the odds are good. At the university of Bari, 42 out of 179 teachers have close relatives in the same faculty. And think about this. A study conducted by Roberto Perotti into competitions for posts in Italy's economics faculties found that the most important factor of success, by a wide margin, was already belonging to the faculty in which the job was up for grabs. Scientific production, measured in terms of publications in recognised international journals, played no part at all. 

Moments of pride

Dancing on the spot

This was taken in Piazza Navona, towards the end of yesterday's Gay Pride in Rome. I had, as I always have, a very good time indeed. I danced, I sang, I stared, I photographed. My impression was that there were an awful lot of people - at one point, halfway down Via Cavour, the whole street seemed to be packed with people from top to bottom. This was confirmed by the organisers, who estimated half a million (the police say 10-20,000. They would, wouldn't they?) The rain held off, and so did party-poopers, with the exception of a rather unpleasant man with dirty grey hair who was clearly upset by the whole business and a small group of youths in suits and ties bearing flags with Celtic crosses on them (like the one, coincidentally, worn by Alemanno) who popped up, appropriately on Via dei Fori Imperiali, and threatened to stab us all. Help! The Italian papers, dramatically, report that the nasty little fascists erupted, presumably in the same way a spot erupts on an otherwise unblemished face. The papers today have given an inordinate amount of space to this trivial hormonal problem, accompanying their articles with the usual display of transsexuals in full ceremonial uniform. Yes, I love them too, and I love the muscle boys and the disco bunnies and the bears, and the world would be a sadder place without them. BUT. I - who have never knowingly worn drag, and no longer have pecs to die for and dance in the privacy of parties and am, just, too slim to be a fully-furred bear, was also there, and so were many thousands of others who were practically indistinguishable from everyone else who wasn't on the march. You know the kind of people I mean: old and young, fat and thin, plain and hot, bright and dim, tall and short, make and female, dog-lovers and dog-haters, right and left. I know this kind of truth goes against the journalistic grain, but it would be refreshing to see newspapers show the sheer variety of the event. It looks as though, once again, it's up to me. So if you'd like to see all the photos I took yesterday, of the ordinary and extraordinary people who took part in Pride, click here. (Flickr has decided to rearrange the order, so you'll be starting at the end and working back...)

PS The title of this post actually refers to a video I've been unable to upload, but I've left it anyway. If nothing else, it reflects the fact that we are still dancing, without any specific advance or sign of it.

Ten percent of population, one day of year. Hmm

Gay Pride comes round once again. Last year, the national event was held in Rome and emotions were running high. Family Day, the church-inspired hate-fest had been and gone shortly before and the mood was one of rebellion and righteous anger. This year, Rome Gay Pride is precisely that, for Romans and anyone prepared to make the trip, and there doesn't seem to be much of a mood at all. Not that small gauntlets haven't been thrown down. The march now ends in Piazza Navona, instead of the previously authorised Piazza San Giovanni, where a bunch of choristers now need heterosexual silence to warble in (this may be a novelty for them). Politically, this is bad news, but hey! Piazza Navona's so much more convenient for the shops no one's complaining. The council, with its new mayor, Gianni "Bovver Boy" Alemanno in charge, has refused its patronage, but that's not new. It was also refused under centre-left administrations. Gauntlets, shmauntlets, in other words.

A worrying note, though, was struck, last night by a lesbian friend of ours. We called to fix up a place to meet. What for? she said. For Gay Pride, we told her. Gay Pride? she said. No one's going on it this year. We are, we said. So if you read this, and are in Rome, you might want to prove her wrong. The march starts in Piazza della Repubblica at 3, heads off down Via Cavour at 4, passes across Piazza Venezia and then, by which route I'm not sure, ends up in Piazza Navona. It's all pretty scenic, so you won't regret it. I'll be the one in 80 centimetre gold lamé platforms and a frock even Ru Paul wouldn't risk wearing. Don't worry, I'm joking.

There will be photos.

Lesser god stuff

Nine days before Gay Pride is supposed to take place in Rome (Saturday, 7 June), the organisers have discovered that the march can no longer end in Piazza San Giovanni, despite authorisation having been granted in April. Why not? Because it would coincide with a choral performance and convention in the Lateran Palace, next door to St. John Lateran. The Lateran Palace has extraterritorial status, which means it doesn't actually belong to Italy or come under Italian jurisdiction, fiscal or otherwise, but that's clearly less important than ensuring the discomfort of the many thousands of Italian taxpayers who'd expected to end their annual march (sorry, vulgar exhibitionist display) in a square traditionally associated with civil rights and the left.

Alemanno strikes again.

No-neh

Gianni Alemanno, Rome's new mayor, as far as I know unasked, has announced that the city will not be supporting Gay Pride 2008 (yes, it's that time of year again), on the grounds that he doesn't approve of sexual displays of any kind, heterosexual or homosexual. This is the standard line now, and really means nothing at all, unless of course he's also going to suggest that Alessandra Mussolini, or Daniala Santanché or any of the other belles du jour of the right, button up their blouses and climb down off their vertiginously high heels, which have the effect, as high heels are designed to have, of emphasising their buttocks and calves, admittedly secondary sexual characteristics, but nonetheless on display. It isn't clear though whether this mayoral disapproval is going to express itself as laissez faire disdain or take the more concrete form of a ban. That would be foolish, and unpopular abroad (as if Alemanno cared). It might be the most practical thing to have us all herded into some suitable public space. A stadium, say. Or one of the gipsy camps about to be emptied of their current inhabitants. Or why not simply put us all in the same place - gipsies and gays together? It won't be the first time, after all. It's actually rather practical. Gipsies are dirty and horribly untidy, while gays love nothing more than rearranging the furniture and ironing doilies. It's a holocaust made in heaven.

Some Forza Italia token gay, god love him, suggests that we should do the march in suits and ties. This reminds me of the time I saw a member of the gay commune Bethnal Rouge - oh heady days! - in unusually sober attire. 'I'm wearing man drag,' he confided. 'I've got to go to the job centre.' On the other hand, Rome is worth a waistcoat...

(It's worth remembering, of course, that Rutelli, the PD candidate for mayor, also withdrew support for Gay Pride on similar grounds. You see how fair I am?)

PS No-neh is the noise Roman matrons make when denying children some small pleasure; it's accompanied by a wagging finger.

Autochthony

The news that Rome Film Festival will be concentrating its efforts on promoting Italian cinema rather than the careers of foreign actors would probably have been greeted with greater enthusiasm if it had come from a liberal mayor. The fact that the decision has been made by Alemanno has led to a rather more - how shall I put this - strident, even hysterical, reaction. Particularly outside Italy, where The Times of Rupert Murdoch, in pot-to-kettle fashion, refers to the new mayor as il Duce. That's as may be. Though it's odd that the spots of hard left leopards seem to wash off with no trouble at all, aided perhaps by a gentle shower of clerical rain, while those adoring the hard right are considered to be as permanent and indelible as Indian ink.

Personally, I'd be happy to see a little more attention being given to an industry that still manages to produce worthwhile cinema - Crialese, Moretti, Soldini, to cite three very different directors - despite the massive attention given by the media and distributors to foreign (read, US) movies. Maybe a little autochthony will do us all good. It will also be refreshing to see less of Walter Veltroni fawning over Hollywood starlets as though they were envoys from the planet Beautiful.

Is this the beginning of the backlash?

Roman salute

I don't live in Rome any more and many of the years I did spend in the city it was ruled by a series of insipid Christian Democrats, their names forgotten, more interested in nest-feathering than the fate of Caput Mundi. The place felt much as it must have done when sheep grazed in the Colosseum and the barbarians were a distant, fond memory. Since then, it's been put on its feet by two centre-left mayors: Francesco Rutelli and Walter Veltroni. The centre's been transformed in the past fifteen years, not always for the better. Some of the most characteristic parts of the city - such as Campo de' Fiori - have been sacrificed in the name of health and safety. Public transport could still be improved, though it remains notably cleaner, faster and cheaper than that in London. (Not, I repeat, not than that in Paris.) It's a far pleasanter place to be than Milan, ex-capital in all but name and gone to the dogs in the past twenty years. It's been shown to be one of the safest cities in Europe and, I think, the safest capital.

So what went wrong? Why did Rome turn its back on Rutelli and elect neo-fascist Gianni Alemanno, an ex-squadrista with a list of arrests for political violence as long as your arm, proud bearer of the Celtic cross (see left), a minister in Berlusconi 's last government, the son-in-law of Pino Rauti, suspected train bomber and founder of Ordine Nuovo? I don't know, and if you want an answer you'll find a lot of finer and more informed political brains than mine only too happy to provide one. I don't know, but. But.

I'd blame a lot of the defeat on the decision to re-propose Francesco Rutelli. The first time round, he was young, innovative, attractive in a rather square-jawed knitting-pattern way. He still had the air of resistance to the institutions that he'd acquired as blue-eyed protégé to Marco Panella. Since then, he's lost an election to Berlusconi, he's shifted from a secular and radical position on civil issues to the kind of half-witted bigotry you get from 'teodems' like Paola Binetti. He's become a mouthpiece for the most blinkered and conservative elements in Italian society. Who needs him? I have nothing but admiration for all those Romans who held their noses while putting a cross beside the man's name, but it can't have been easy. Next to Rutelli, even Gianni Alemanno might look like a new broom. Albeit one in the sweeping hands of Berlusconi, Bossi and the Vatican (whose current CEO also has a rather murky fascist past).

If Veltroni wanted the PD to look like a paradigm shift in Italian politics he couldn't have picked a worse candidate than the mealy-mouthed institutionalised has-been he chose. It was a lazy decision, and a contemptuous one. And now both Rome and the entire country will have to live with the consequences.

Charlton Heston and, er, Morrissey

Some of Charlton Heston's reactionary political antics during the last few decades of his life probably warrant one of my Good Riddance posts, but that's not all there was to the man. This photograph, taken in 1961, shows another, earlier, and more generous side to him. It comes from a nicely rounded Independent article, according to which the rot set in during his fifties. Let this be a warning to all those of us currently passing through that dangerous decade.

Apropos of reactionary viewpoints, Morrissey recently won a court apology from The Word, which had quoted him as complaining that Britain had lost its 'identity' as a result of immigration. As far as I know, Morrissey still lives in Trastevere, one of the oldest areas in Rome and occupied in large measure by immigrants. Not the kind people complain of when they pontificate about identity. The other kind. The rich, white kind that loves the Rome of Pasolini and Anna Magnani and style accessories like lines of washing overhead and parked Lambrettas. That this Rome no longer exists is due in no small measure to the presence of culture tourists like Morrissey, whose attachment to Italy is, I imagine, far less integrated than that of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose presence in Britain over the past forty years has not only ensured the functioning of essential services, but also contributed to creating its current 'identity'.

How old is Morrissey?

Pontification

Ratzinger's campaign against Italy's newly-formed Partito Democratico (PD) continues apace. Not content with planting his emotionally warped moles (read, self-mortifying Paola Binetti and the other so-called Teodems - though what they understand of theology or democracy is anybody's guess) into the heart of a party that continues to represent, numerically at least, the last gasp of the long and often great tradition of Italian communism, he used an address to the Roman administration yesterday to deliver a direct attack on its leader, Walter Veltroni.

God knows, I'm no fan of Veltroni, nor of the PD, but it's pretty rich when Ratzinger accuses the city's administration of allowing Rome to fall into a state of gravissimo degrado. He was probably too busy fiddling with Georg studying theology to notice what Rome was like twenty-odd years ago, under the rule of the inept and effortlessly corrupt Christian Democrats backed by the Vatican, but I remember it well: dirty, degraded, inefficient, unkempt, stationary. It's true that a lot of Veltroni's reforms have been cosmetic, but hey! a little lip gloss and mascara is no bad thing. More to the point, Rome actually feels like the capital of Italy in a way it never did, especially as its only rival, Milan, slides into squalor and neglect, personified by the sadly abandoned state of its central station.

Ratzinger says the city doesn't guarantee the safety of its citizens. According to a recent survey, Rome is the safest major city in Europe. But what are facts to the merchants of revealed truth? He says that Rome has problems of homelessness, low wages, social inequality. He says this from his usual pulpit, dressed in his usual finery, exempt from VAT, the recipient of a slice of Italian tax money that would make a whore blush. He doesn't say it because he cares (he cares? come on!), but because it's what his real supporters - Italy's centre-right - want to hear. He's set his sights so low he's now an unofficial part of the opposition. He's there with Sandro Bondi (ex-communist) and Michela Vittoria Brambilla, Berlusconi totty, rooting around in the political muck for the odd truffle.

And what's the solution? (Apart from blocking in its tracks a party that might - just might - manage to reform Italy.) That's right. The family. And what kind of family? Right again. The kind based on marriage between a man and a woman. So let's run through this again. Homelessness, poverty, inequality? All it takes to solve them is to stop gay couples having any kind of rights at all. It's all so simple, you wonder why Jesus didn't think of it.

The Almost Corner Bookshop

Once upon a time there was a bookshop in Rome called the Corner Bookshop. It still exists, but it's moved slightly up from the river - wisely, as climatic things go - and is now the Almost Corner Bookshop. It's run by the delightful Dermot O'Connell, has a poetry section that would put many far larger bookshops to shame and has already ordered two copies of Little Monsters. If you're in Rome and have nothing to read and want to go to a genuine bookshop (i.e. one where the owner likes, and knows about, books) you could do an awful lot worse than pass by Via del Moro 45 and say hello to Dermot. The shop's in Trastevere, just a few doors away from Mario's, a trattoria I once couldn't live without (in the most basic sense), so you can combine the visit with any number of other pleasurable things (the Minimumfax bookshop just up the road isn't bad either). And in most cases you won't spend any more than you would if you bought the books at home (assuming Rome isn't your home). Come on. You've read Doris Lessing's Nobel speech (I hope). Now buy the books. Read. Turn off the computer Stop blogging. Read. (Oh God.)

Sick building

The university language centre, where I work, is on the seventh floor of one of Rome's ugliest buildings, halfway between the Pyramid and St Paul outside the Walls. Thrown up in the 1970s, it manages to seem both shoddy and hulking. It might have been modish at the time, with its matt grey panels and brutal silhouette, but time has done it no favours. It houses, among other things, Rome's traffic police, where people pay their fines, and the local tax offices. Not surprisingly, it's an unloved place. Which may explain why we all had to leave the building at 5 pm on Monday, following an anonymous call to say that someone had left a bomb. We stood outside for a while, then headed home.