«Città e Storia», III, 2008, 1-2, pp. 189-200 ©2009 Università Roma Tre-CROMA ROMA SPARITA: LOCAL IDENTITY AND FASCIST MODERNITY AT THE MUSEO DI ROMA Anticamente qui c’era un droiere, E du’ porte più avanti er macellaro Poi, sur cantone d’angolo er barbiere E ne’ la casa accanto er salumaro. Appresso l’Oratorio, cor santaro Che vendeva li libbri de preghiere: E doppo, er farmacista, el sor Gennaro, Che teneva in vetrina un gran braghiere. Proprio de faccia, sopra l’orzarolo, (Dove che adesso c’è quer palazzone) Ciabbitava un vecchietto, solo, solo; E ner vicolo, dietro a la funtana, Ce stava l’osteria dove Panzone Annacquava er vinello de Manziana. In the old days, there was a grocer here And a few doors down, the butcher And then, on the corner, the barber And in the house next door, the salami-seller. Close by [was] the Oratory, with the vendor Who sold prayer-books there And after that, the pharmacist, Mr. Gennaro, Who had a large brazier in his window In front, above the bread shop, (Where that big building now stands) An old man lived all alone; And in the alley, behind the fountain, There was the tavern where the Fat Man Watered down wine from Manziana. Antonio Muñoz, Roma sparita (1940)1 At first glance, this poem would seem not particularly remarkable. Written in Roman dialect (romanesco), it offers a mawkish tour of the author’s childhood haunts, recalling sights that had long been buried in the distant recesses of his mind. The poem only gains greater significance once one realizes that its author was the inspector general of Fine Arts and Antiquities (Ripartizione X - Antichità e Belle Arti, or AABBAA) for Rome’s civic administration from 1929 to 19432. In this capacity, Antonio Muñoz was one of the principal architects of «Mussolini’s Rome», presiding over thewholesale destruction of many of the city’s traditional neighborhoods and historic buildings3. In other words, he «La Strenna dei Romanisti», I, 1940, p. 45. On Muñoz and the AABBAA, see C. BELLANCA, Antonio Muñoz: la politica di tutela dei monumenti di Roma durante il Governatorato, Roma, L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2003 and Gli anni del Governatorato (1926-1944): interventi urbanistici, scoperte archeologiche, arredo urbano, restauri, L. CARDILLI (ed.), Roma, Edizioni Kappa, 1995. 3 For recent scholarship on the fascist regime’s urban planning interventions, see E. GENTILE, Fas1 2 190 JOSHUA ARTHURS was directly implicated in the removal of those people and places elegized in Roma sparita («vanished Rome»). More typical of Muñoz’s approach was his conviction that in the capital «only great voices should resonate, only great words should be uttered; and all that is small and wretched should disappear»4. There was no room for the grocer, butcher or barber in the majestic landscape of Roma fascista; the bread shop would have to make way for a new palazzo. Seen in this light, Muñoz’s poem becomes more complicated and troubling. Is it a belated expression of regret, an unrepentant acknowledgment of responsibility or a cynical bit of whimsy? Muñoz was also a driving force behind the Museo di Roma (Museum of Rome), established in 1930 as the city’s first civic museum and a repository for those «small and wretched» things displaced by its tumultuous modernization. Relocated, reorganized and expanded since the Second World War, the museum remains an important institution for local history and memory, as well as a popular tourist destination; however, few contemporary visitors are familiar with its origins and its intended function5. For the planners of Mussolini’s Rome, the Museo di Roma was not just a venue in which to record the city’s history and culture but was itself an instrument in its transformation. By establishing the museum as a hermetically sealed space, Antonio Muñoz and his colleagues could consign Rome’s popular culture and local traditions to the realm of memory and nostalgia, divorced from contemporary life. The museumification of Roma sparita was the necessary corollary of constructing Roma Mussolinea. In this article, I examine the interplay between civic museums and the local identities – the people and places – that they commemorate. We are accustomed to the notion that museums evoke or reanimate the past, that their presentation of material culture offers the opportunity to experience history in a tangible, immediate fashion. However, they are also capable of performing the converse function, of consigning the present to history and establishing distance – physical, temporal, emotional – between persons and objects. Since the inception of the modern museum in the late eighteenth century, critics have repeatedly noted its phonetic similarity with the word mausoleum6; as Theodore Adorno famously wrote, the museum turns the artifacts of everyday experience into cismo di pietra, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2007 and B. PAINTER, Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City, New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005; the most authoritative work remains A. CEDERNA, Mussolini urbanista: lo sventramento di Roma negli anni di consenso, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1981. 4 A. MUÑOZ, Campidoglio, Roma, Governatorato di Roma, 1931, p. 23. 5 For the postwar and contemporarymuseum, see C. PIETRANGELI, Il Museo di Roma: documenti e iconografia, Bologna, Cappelli, 1971 and R. LEONE, Il Museo di Roma racconta la città, Roma, Gangemi, 2002. Many of the materials from the interwar museum are nowhoused in the satellite Museo di Roma in Trastevere; see Il Museo di Roma in Trastevere, M. BIAGI-M. CORSI-D. OCCHIUZZI (eds.), Roma, Palombi Editori, 2004. 6 For a survey of this critique, see D. SHERMAN, Quatremère/Benjamin/Marx: Art Museums, Aura, and Commodity Fetishism in D. SHERMAN-I. ROGOFF (eds.), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1994, pp. 123-143. ROMA SPARITA: LOCAL IDENTITY AND FASCIST MODERNITY AT THE MUSEO DI ROMA191 objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art. They testify to the neutralization of culture. Art treasures are horded in them, and their market value leaves no room for the pleasure of looking at them7. In other words, by removing objects or works of art from their original, organic context, and recasting them as fragile historical traces to be preserved, catalogued and studied, the museum deprives them of their contemporary vitality. This function is not necessarily intended or explicit; however, in some instances this power of ‘museal transubstantiation’ has been deliberately exploited8. The most egregious example in this regard is the Jewish Museum in Prague, originally established by the Nazis with the goal of documenting a people who would one day be extinct9; their hope was that the museumification of the Jews would go hand-in-hand with their biological elimination. In a similar fashion, the museum has also been used as a repository for objects that have become controversial in the public sphere. Some cities in the southern United States have relocated Confederate memorials to museums, thereby transforming them from objects of political controversy to «mere» historical artifacts. Many Eastern European nations are currently doing the same with the monumental remains of the Soviet era that that still dominate their cityscapes10. By drawing such comparisons, I do not mean to suggest that the Museo di Roma should be viewed in quasi-genocidal terms. Nevertheless, I do believe that the museum’s creation was informed by a certain kind of implicit violence – an aggressive, authoritarian ideology of modernization, accompanied by a virulent hostility towards sentimentality, domestic life and local identity11. To elucidate this idea further, I begin by exploring the fascist regime’s antipathy towards Roma sparita, the rapidly disappearing city as expressed by its indigenous inhabitants, popular traditions and personal memories. I then examine how these attitudes informed the museological depiction of the traditional city, culminating in the establishment of the Museo di Roma. 7 T. ADORNO, Valéry Proust Museum in Prisms, translated by S. and S. Weber, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1981, pp. 175-185: 175. 8 W. ERNST , Archi(ve)textures of Museology, in S. CRANE (ed.), Museums and Memory, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000, pp. 17-34: 24-25. 9 On the Jewish Museum in Prague, see H. VOLAVKOVÁ, A Story of the Jewish Museum in Prague, Prague, Artia, 1968, as well as W. ERNST , Archi(ve)textures of Museology, cit. 10 In both instances, see S. LEVINSON, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1998. 11 On the pervasiveness of violence in fascist conceptions of modernity, see D. FORGACS, Fascism, Violence and Modernity, in J. HOWLETT -R. MENGHAM (eds.), The Violent Muse: Violence and the Artistic Imagination in Europe, 1910-1939, New York, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp. 5-21. 192 JOSHUA ARTHURS Nostalgia as Disease: Fascism and Traditional Rome Fascism’s attempts to remake the Eternal City in its own image remain one of the most enduring legacies of the Ventennio. Many readers will doubtless be familiar with the regime’s dramatic interventions in the historic center, its excavation of ancient sites and demolition of medieval neighborhoods to make way for wide boulevards and massive squares. The most concise statement of the regime’s vision for the capital remains Mussolini’s speech installing the new governor of Rome in December 1925: Within five years, Rome must appear a marvel to all peoples of the world: vast, ordered, powerful, as it was during the first empire of Augustus. Continue to liberate the trunk of the great oak from all that still constrains it. Create space around the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Theater of Marcellus, the Capitoline Hill, the Pantheon. All that has grown up over the centuries of decadence must disappear […] Also liberate the majestic temples of Christian Rome from parasitic and profane constructions. The millennial monuments of our history must loom in necessary solitude.12 This address describes essential qualities of Mussolini’s Rome and the means by which it would achieved. The capital would be massive and monumental, drawing inspiration from the age of Augustus. In addition to new planning schemes and construction, this entailed above all the «liberation» of the city’s ancient structures and the restoration of Rome’s imperial topography. The material remains of those «centuries of decadence» – loosely conceived as running from the demise of the ancient Empire to the March on Rome in 1922 – were dangerous and diseased, constraining progress and infecting the urban body. The palliative for this «parasitism» was the application of surgical violence: «gutting» (sventramento), «isolation» (isolamento) and «reclamation» (valorizzazione or bonifica)13. Such «parasitic and profane» constructions were not the only cancers afflicting Rome’s ancient urban fabric; the presence of inhabitants was equally distressing. Ruins could only become monuments by being denuded, by being emptied of all traces of human activity14. This was especially pressing given the dim view that the B. MUSSOLINI, Opera omnia, XXII, a cura di E. Susmel-D. Susmel, Firenze, La Fenice, 1957, p. 48. On the convergence of urban planning and social hygiene under the regime, see D. HORN, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction and Italian Modernity, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 95-122. On the pervasiveness of medical and surgical discourse in fascist rhetoric, see F. RIGOTTI, Il medico-chirugo dello stato nel linguaggio metaforico di Mussolini, in Cultura e società negli anni del fascismo, a cura di C. Brezzi-L. Ganapini, Milano, Cordani, 1987, pp. 501-517. This language was also reflects pervasive concerns in European criminology, sociology and urban planning over the previous half-century. Haussmann invoked a similarly ‘surgical’ approach in his transformation of Second-Empire Paris. See D. HARVEY, Paris, Capital of Modernity, New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 259-266. 14 A similar point is made by Benedict Anderson with regard to the museumification of southeast Asian temples; see B. ANDERSON, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1991, p. 182. Another interesting parallel can be found in Washington, DC; see M. FARRAR, Making the City Beautiful: Aesthetic Reform and the (Dis)placement of Bodies in A. BINGAMAN-L. SANDERS-R. ZORACH (eds.), Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis, New York, Routledge, 2002, pp. 37-54. 12 13 ROMA SPARITA: LOCAL IDENTITY AND FASCIST MODERNITY AT THE MUSEO DI ROMA193 regime held of the local populace. Whether caused by centuries of insular Papal rule, economic underdevelopment or an essentially «southern» character, native Romans were seen as incorrigibly backwards, corrupt and indigent. Many regions of Italy, like Tuscany or Lombardy, could be cast as repositories of vital and authentic folk traditions that enriched national life15. On the other hand, the vernacular culture of Rome, from its cuisine to its dialect, was considered primitive and provincial. The Rome to be valued was the great city of history and art, the Urbs Caput Mundi; in comparison to the majestic reminders of this past, the contemporary city and its inhabitants resembled «fungi that grow at the feet of massive oaks»16. Finally, as the capital, Rome was meant to embody national unity and cultural primacy, not local eccentricity. Fascism sought to impose a centralized and homogenized conception of Italianness that would be undercut by any expression of regional particularism. Nowhere were these concerns more in evidence than in piazza Montanara, a square located just south of the Capitoline Hill and adjacent to the ancient Theater of Marcellus and the Jewish Ghetto. For centuries, the piazza had served as a market and a meeting-place for peasants (burini) from the hills around Rome (hence the name montanara, «of the mountains»), offering a noisy and chaotic display of popular life. Even in the twentieth century, lamented Antonio Muñoz, piazza Montanara recalled a scene from days of the Grand Tour, crowded with stereotypical figures like «the public scribe, the charlatans, the foreman who would hire those provincial constructionworkers who met in that area, the multi-colored crowd of burini of the municipal market, the antiquarian hunting coins, the open-air barber»17. Against this motley cast of characters, «idling in the square, sitting on the ground or on the sidewalks, where the more enterprising among them did a small business […] in second-hand tobacco», the Theater of Marcellus had been reduced to «a decorative element: nothing more»18. Even after years of fascist administration, the monument remained half-entombed by later additions, its arches filled with stables, warehouses, and other unsavory establishments like «the vendors of agricultural implements, umbrellas or overcoats»19. The spectacle of piazza Montanara clearly challenged the regime’s goals of order, hygiene and historical sobriety. It was fitting, therefore, that the square lay in the path of the via del Mare, a new road connecting the city center with the coast. On the promotion of folk cultures under fascism, see M. T OZZI FONTANA, Il ruolo delle mostre etnografiche in Italia nella organizzazione del consenso 1936-1940, «Italia Contemporanea», 1979, 137, pp. 97-103. While the centralizing and culturally homogenizing goals of authoritarian regimes are often emphasized, in many instances such regimes also promote regional identities; see X. NÚÑEZ-M. UMBACH, Hijacked Heimats: National Appropriations of Local and Regional Identities in Germany and Spain, 1930-1945, «European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’Histoire», XV, 2008, 3, pp. 295-316. 16 B. MUSSOLINI, Opera omnia, cit., XVIII, p. 160. 17 A. MUÑOZ, L’isolamento del colle capitolino, Roma, Governatorato di Roma, 1943, p. 6. 18 E. PONTI, Le memorie di piazza Montanara, «Capitolium», VII, 1931, 1, p. 21. 19 A. MUÑOZ, L’isolamento del colle, cit., p. 6. 15 194 JOSHUA ARTHURS Between 1925 and 1930, the square fell to the pick-axe. Concurrently, the Theater of Marcellus was cleared of shops and hovels, and the original structure was returned to the light of day. Flanked by the new road, the monument presented a clean, symmetrical façade, its arches looming over racing automobiles. Significantly, the Theater’s restorations were performed under the auspices of the Istituto per le Case Popolari (ICP), the state office of public housing. Believed to threaten the dignity of the ancient monument, the displaced families were promised tidy new homes outside of the city center. The petty affairs of daily life belonged in the hygienic new borgate built on the underdeveloped periphery, not in the symbolic heart of the nation20. These measures met with limited and powerless resistance from local residents, and there was no public campaign to rescue piazza Montanara or any other traditional neighborhood from destruction21. Those who expressed even a momentary twinge of regret were aggressively derided as nostalgics hostile to the forces of progress and trapped in the mindset of nineteenth-century romanticism. One critic – ironically, the local historian Pietro Poncini – likened such creatures to a poor old woman […] crying over a discolored portrait of herself [that] she was once beautiful […]. Those sick with this degenerative disease are incurable, untreatable and to be avoided for fear of contagion […].This disease, called “nostalgia for the past”, is therefore dangerous, because beneath the innocuous appearance of local pride, green venom spurts […] from the toothless mouths of these malicious reptiles. Truly, they do not worship hygiene, but great is their tenacity in exalting the past and detesting the present22. Not only were Rome’s traditional quarters unhealthy and infectious, but, it seems, so too were those who continued to mourn their passing. Nostalgia and sentiment were regularly cast as pathological. Even those commentators more sympathetic than Poncini routinely argued that the desire to conserve the vestiges of the past had to be overcome in order to make way for contemporary life. For the literary critic Emilio Cecchi, old streets and familiar sights might have been pleasing to the imagination, but in the long run they were little more than «backdrops, views for a showthat is certainly enjoyable, touching, but ultimately nostalgic and passive, not creative […] in the end, the world, the surface of the earth, is made for living men and not the deceased»23. As painful as they were, these sacrifices were necessary to make way for a newRome, worthy of Mussolini’s NewItaly. At any rate, Muñoz insisted, the memory of the razed neighborhoods would quickly become 20 On the displacement of working-class residents to the suburbs of Rome, see D. GHIRARDO, City and Suburb in Fascist Italy: Rome, 1922-43, in M. QUANTRILL-B. WEBB (eds.), Urban Forms, Suburban Dreams, College Station, TX, Texas A&M University Press, 1993, pp. 49-64. 21 For an interesting examination of Romans’ complaints to the authorities, see P. BAXA, Piacentini’s Window: the Modernism of the Fascist Master Plan of Rome, «Contemporary European History», XIII, 2004, 1, pp. 1-20. 22 P. PONCINI, Un tentativo di cura…fotografica, «La Strenna dei Romanisti», III, 1942, pp. 82-86: 83. 23 E. CECCHI, Psicologia delle demolizioni, «Capitolium», XII, 1937, 1, pp. 31-38: 34. ROMA SPARITA: LOCAL IDENTITY AND FASCIST MODERNITY AT THE MUSEO DI ROMA195 so distant that it is now difficult to remember their appearance. Now, it is amusing to listen to the folks […] recall that “In the old days, there was a barber-shop there […]”. And “the old days” refers to barely two or three months ago! […]. These recent memories nowseem ancient, relics of a seemingly distant epoch24. ‘An Urn for Our Sweet Nostalgia’: the Museo di Roma In fact, the regime did make a few conciliatory gestures to the residents of those neighborhoods slated for demolition. Inaugurating the excavation of the Mausoleum of Augustus in 1934, a project that required the demolition of 120 houses over an area of 27,000 square meters, Mussolini reassured locals that «photographs of the exteriors and interiors to be demolished [would] be collected in great albums, photographs dedicated to those few who remain nostalgic for so-called “local color”»25. Mussolini’s promise speaks to a correlative aspect of fascism’s hostility towards popular Rome. The city’s traditions and local identities had to be removed from the face of the modern capital, but they could be archived or preserved as keepsakes. The residents of demolished neighborhoods were frequently assured that their homes would be «preserved in photographs, prints and water-colors, so that they could be rebuilt elsewhere», though this reconstruction never seems to have occurred26. The use of photography – «the most modern of media» – made it possible to preserve this rapidly disappearing world, and even to retreat into a lost universe of personal memories and authentic experience27. However, while this record allowed viewers to revisit the cityscape of their youth, it also reinforced the permanence of urban transformation. Photographic representation, argues Roland Barthes, is as much an act of forgetting as an act of commemoration28. In lieu of a present object, the photograph depicts «what has been» or even «what is no longer», testifying to its existence but simultaneously condemning it to a «flat Death» by fixing it at one moment in time. Seen from this perspective, the regime’s recording of demolished sites through photography can be understood as operating hand in hand with their physical destruction, transforming them from real spaces into vanished relics. Even more than photography, national and city authorities used museum display as a means to capture and commemorate Roma sparita. In 1927, as the first demolitions were getting underway, Antonio Muñoz and the Governatorato held an exhibition on Roma che sparisce (i.e. not «disappeared» but «disappearing» Rome). Organized in conjunction with the Artistic Association of via Margutta, it featured over 250 paintings of sites that had either been recently demolished or were ‘desA. MUÑOZ, Via dei Monti e Via del Mare, Roma, Governatorato di Roma, 1933, p. 35. B. MUSSOLINI, Opera omnia, cit., XXVI, p. 368. 26 A. MUÑOZ, Via dei Monti, cit., p. 31. 27 C. CECCHELLI, Viatico della Roma che fu, «Capitolium», III, 1928, 5-6, pp. 229-274: 237. 28 R. BARTHES, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by R. Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1981, pp. 76-94. 24 25 196 JOSHUA ARTHURS tined for sacrifice’ under the new Master Plan for the city29. The same year, local authorities organized the Mostra del Costume di Roma e del Lazio (Exhibition of the Customs of Rome and Lazio) under the direction of the Roman folklorist Giuseppe Ceccarelli, also known as ‘Ceccarius’. The exhibition aimed to preserve as many memories and artifacts of the old city as possible, at a moment in which they risked «being permanently submerged in the oblivion of time»30. The organizers persuaded local families to lend them precious antiques and heirlooms, from old cooking implements to traditional clothing; the exhibition also featured scale models of domestic life and colorful street scenes. Ceccarelli’s goal was not an academic history lesson but «to re-evoke only what is distinctive and interesting about the past […] to show the harmony of colors it displayed, the splendor of its brocades, silks, velvets, noble cloths that made it precious»31. Another exhibition inspired by similar goals was the Mostra Retrospettiva di Topografia Romana (Historical Exhibition of Roman Topography) organized by the Istituto di Studi Romani in 1929. Designed to reanimate «a world that is already so distant and legendary», it aimed to create «a calm and free atmosphere that helps us imagine the easy life that once thrived in the same streets in which today we do not so much live as struggle, so cumbersome and not picturesque, reduced to long bands of asphalt, deafened by the din and blinded by movement»32. To this end, the exhibition charted the transformation of Rome’s urban fabric from classical antiquity to the present, depicted in sources ranging from Renaissance paintings and eighteenth-century prints to recent aerial photographs. These temporary exhibitions from the late 1920s established recurring tropes that would be most fully realized with the creation of the Museo di Roma in 1930. The museum was first proposed by Ceccarelli and Muñoz at the Istituto di Studi Romani’s national congress of 1928. According to Ceccarelli, Rome still lacked a civic museum that would «collect memories from every time and every era, the great and the small, those that relate to days of power and glory, and those that recall the sad and dark times, hours of anguish and pain»33. By assembling these relics, it would be possible to piece together a chronicle of the city’s daily life throughout the ages. Unlike the city’s other historical museums, the Museo di Roma would not function as yet another collection of Rome’s unparalleled aesthetic and historical patrimony, another imposing gallery of its glorious past and great heroes. The Eternal City was already crowded with museums in which «marbles and canvases are accumulated, like prisoners, in 29 A. MUÑOZ, Roma che sparisce: la Mostra dell’Associazione Aristica a Via Margutta, «Capitolium», III, 1927, 2, pp. 57-68: 64. 30 F. MASTRIGLI, La Mostra del costume di Roma e del Lazio, Roma, Pinci, 1927, p. 13. 31 Ivi, p. 20. 32 L. DE GREGORI, Mostra di Topografia Romana, «Capitolium», X, 1929, 10, pp. 502-520: 520. 33 G. CECCARELLI, Fondazione ed organizzazione del ‘Museo di Roma’, «Atti del I Congresso Nazionale di Studi Romani», I, 1928, pp. 666-668: 666. ROMA SPARITA: LOCAL IDENTITY AND FASCIST MODERNITY AT THE MUSEO DI ROMA197 closed rooms, the object of admiring gasps from English misses, or like riddles for art critics»34. There would be «no Julius Caesar, no Gregory the Great, no Petrarch, no Cola di Rienzo or Michelangelo» on display, but instead the «humble and curious figures of the petty bourgeoisie and the people; not the drama of great history but little episodes of popular, intimate, domestic life: the recounting of joys, hardships, childhood delights, the ingenuous thoughts of the Roman [romanesco] people»35. In order to illustrate this «popular, intimate, domestic life», visitors were led through a historical itinerary of the city’s culture and urban fabric from the thirteen century (seen as representing «the rebirth of a popular consciousness here and throughout Italy» out of the darkness precipitated by the fall of the Empire) to the advent of fascism. Plans and prints demonstrated the expansion and transformation of the city over the centuries; reconstructions of carriages and Pius IX’s rail car conjured the pomp and ceremony of Papal rule; etchings by Piranesi evoked the Rome of the Grand Tour, its famous monuments submerged and overgrown with ivy; and watercolors by artists like the local Romantic painter Ettore Roesler-Franz depicted typical street scenes from the late nineteenth century. Roesler-Franz’s paintings in particular were held up as having both documentary and aesthetic value. Those viewing them might «lament a few sacrifices that could have been spared», but all Romans had to recognize that «these few errors made up for the grand result»36. Another series of rooms – echoing the Mostra del Costume – offered life-size reconstructions of popular life in ‘old Rome’, including a performance of a traditional dance (the saltarello), a scene inside an old tavern, and a public scribe at work in piazza Montanara37. In his original proposal, Ceccarelli also emphasized that the installations of the Museo di Roma were not meant to remain static; rather, they were to be «updated continuously, to capture the memory of all the transformations that [were] occurring in Rome, especially topographically»38. This was to be the museum’s most important function: beyond the celebration of local customs and traditions, it would serve as a record of the pick-axe’s progress, conserving the traces of a life rapidly disappearing with the construction of a modern Roma Mussolinea. It would house «the paltry materials drawn from the demolitions […] [s]ome old gate that adorned one of the demolished shacks, some little sacred kiosk, some old road-sign»39. For Antonio Muñoz, this act of conservation was an essential corollary to the larger task of renoA. MUÑOZ, Il Museo di Roma, Roma, Governatorato di Roma, 1930, p. 8. Ivi, p. 8 and p. 10. Note the use of the term romanesco, denoting Rome’s folk traditions and dialect, rather than the historical designation of romano. 36 P. MOLAJONI, Roma capitale, «Capitolium», VIII, 1932, 1-2, pp. 59-66: 64. 37 On the history of these reconstructions, see M. CORSI, Cose brutte di un certo valore: appunti per una cronologia delle ‘scene romane’ al Museo di Roma in Trastevere, «Lares», LXIX, 2003, 2, pp. 307-332. 38 G. CECCARELLI, Fondazione ed organizzazione, cit., p. 668. 39 A. MUÑOZ, Via dei Monti, cit., p. 35. 34 35 198 JOSHUA ARTHURS vating and valorizing the capital, «because the great transformations of the city required a place to house architectural fragments of demolished houses, and views of streets and neighborhoods that have changed»40. In 1934, well after most of the demolitions had occurred, he reassured the public of the Governatorato’s «constant vigilance» and its commitment that that no place or monument would disappear without first being recorded in paintings and prints, which are then collected in the Museo di Roma; there are already rooms designated for the area around the Capitoline prior to its isolation, another for the Theater of Marcellus, another for the neighborhoods now occupied by the via dell’Impero, another for views of the typical old piazza around the Forum of Trajan. The best artists in Rome today are collaborating on these reproductions of all that is disappearing41. Significantly, Muñoz emphasizes here that paintings would serve as the principal record of Roma sparita, not the photographs promised by Mussolini at the Mausoleum of Augustus. The latter were deemed «documents to preserve in an archive, not to show in a museum: they give the external appearance of things, but do not reflect their soul»42. The Museo di Roma was not intended to function as a scientific record of the city’s past or a formally didactic institution, but to be a place of nostalgia, imagination and comfort. This emotive and aestheticizing orientation is clear from the organization and layout of the installations: eschewing modern museological techniques like labeling, spotlighting or rationalized itineraries, the galleries more closely resembled a private collection in an old palazzo, its rooms crowded with busts, canvases and furniture. Muñoz envisioned the museum as an oasis of tranquility, a retreat from the «noisy traffic of modern life, to return to the calm and serene memories of times gone by; the times that our grandparents described, and which even reach back to the days – oh Lord, how remote – of our childhood»43. The tone of the museum was meant to be overwhelmingly familiar and familial, just like an urn for our sweet nostalgia, a refuge for our dreaming souls, the oasis where we Romans can go to renew our spirits, among the dear little things of the life that once was […] it will be a museum all our own, which might elicit sympathetic smiles from foreigners who believe themselves more civilized than us, and who look down at the rather provincial customs of our old city [...]. But for us, it is like a part of our homes, like the memento cabinet of a family that holds Grandfather’s tobacco-box and Mother’s mass book: every picture, every object, every costume, reminds us of some dear aspect of our beautiful city, a page in its incomparable history, or better, in its daily chronicle44. As this last passage suggests, this depiction of Roma sparita was framed in largely emotional terms, evoking scenes from domestic life instead of recounting either the grand ID., Roma di Mussolini, Milano, Treves, 1935, p. 245. ID., Nuove sale del Museo di Roma, «Capitolium», X, 1934, 4, pp. 157-174: 174. 42 ID., Il Museo di Roma, cit., p. 50. 43 Ivi, p. 7. 44 Ivi, p. 8. 40 41 ROMA SPARITA: LOCAL IDENTITY AND FASCIST MODERNITY AT THE MUSEO DI ROMA199 narrative of the city’s past or the regime’s aspirations for its future. Similarly, the artifacts on display were presented not as historical artifacts to be studied professionally, but as family heirlooms to be treasured. In this way, the Museo di Roma managed to embrace the local color that was anathema to the regime and affectionately acknowledge its backwardness and idiosyncrasy. Still, at no point was this mission seen as being at odds with fascism’s project of refashioning the capital and its inhabitants. Even as he celebrated the popular traditions preserved by the museum, Antonio Muñoz acknowledged the necessity of sacrificing them in the name of progress. While sympathizing with those who wished for the old city to remain the same, he conceded that «the urgency of life does not allow these poetic dreams, and requires the city, in order to be worthy of its new greatness, to transform itself and adapt itself to the rhythm of the times»45. This point was reinforced by the museum’s location in piazza Bocca della Verità, just steps away from the former piazza Montanara. As they strolled through the memories of old Rome, visitors could look out the windowto see the newface of the city, represented by the cleared piazza, the rapid traffic on the via del Mare, and the ancient monuments recently liberated by the Governatorato. Safely confined within the boundaries of the museum, Roma sparita was removed from the flow of daily life in the modern city. Epilogue: A Return to piazza Montanara A tragic final chapter of this story occurred with fascism’s official adoption of antiSemitism in 1938. If the Jewish experience of in Italy was quite different from that of other European countries, the Jews of Rome were in a particularly unusual position46. Unlike other communities that had migrated to the peninsula in more recent centuries, Jews claimed to have lived in the Eternal City since the days of the Caesars; furthermore, their confinement in the Ghetto until 1870 had insulated them from the social and cultural modernization occurring elsewhere. As a result, Roman Jews were not just a marginal minority but an important repository of local folk traditions. The dialect heard in Ghetto streets still echoed the romanesco immortalized by the nineteenth-century vernacular poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli; the restaurants of via Portico d’Ottavia specialized in quintessentially Roman dishes like carciofi alla giudia (deep-fried artichokes) and filetti di baccalà (battered cod fillets). Despite its millennial identification with the Eternal City, however, the community became stigmatized and isolated as a result of the Racial Laws. Interestingly, though, propaganda against Roman Jews did not emphasize the standard anti-Semitic tropes of cosmopolitanism, disloyalty or racial corruption. Rather, it tended to reiterate many of the charges that had once been leveled against Roma sparita: traditionalism, provincialism and atavism. Ivi, p. 46. On Roman Jews, see A. CASTALDINI, Ebrei di Roma: duemila anni in riva al Tevere, «Limes», 2005, 2, pp. 277-285; and F. DEL REGNO, Gli ebrei a Roma tra le due guerre mondiali: fonti e problemi di ricerca, «Storia Contemporanea», XXIII, 1992, 1, pp. 5-67. 45 46 200 JOSHUA ARTHURS This sentiment was expressed most vividly by the anti-Semitic theorist Paolo Orano in his 1938 manifesto Gli ebrei in Italia [The Jews in Italy]. Orano described a stroll through the Roman Ghetto as an «astonishing» and «irritating» experience47: Was it possible that Roman and Italian citizens, despite the fact that the [Ghetto] gates had been broken down […] continued to put on the shameful spectacle of splitting the citizenry, among the murky alleyways, in the dark, fetid shops, in cellars, bunched together, suspicious, huddled and restless, emerging only with their carts in which the Jew, with his piercing cry of «used clothes» collected rags, empty bottles, rusted metal, broken and worm-eaten furniture, sole-less shoes, just as in distant centuries?48 Just as the outdoor barbers, pickpockets and day laborers of piazza Montanara had once provided a disgraceful reminder of Italian backwardness, so too did the residents of the Jewish Ghetto remain as a blemish on the face of Mussolini’s modern capital. Ultimately, they would also be displaced and transported from the city center, though not to the suburban borgate. On October 16, 1943, German soldiers rounded up over one thousand Jews for transport to Auschwitz; the collection point for the captured was none other than the area around the Theater of Marcellus – the very spot where, only a few years prior, the vendors of piazza Montanara had once hawked their wares. Conclusion In his landmark work Les lieux de mémoire, Pierre Nora argues that the dramatic transformations of modernity have led to the disruption of traditional solidarities and identities49. The result of this «acceleration» is that contemporary society has become preoccupied with an increasingly remote past – and therefore with an ever-expanding history. In an attempt to slow this process, we create artificial «sites» – the archive, the museum, the monument – intended to perform the role once played by organic traditions. As the case of the Museo di Roma suggests, however, these sites can themselves hasten the «acceleration of history». By turning the present into the past, and the vital into the historical, a museum designed to safeguard Rome’s popular traditions and local identities became a vehicle for their eradication. A museum can be a vital space, but equally it can be a mausoleum; it can reanimate the past or consign it to the dustbin of history. Perhaps this function is particularly prevalent for civic museums, as institutions that trace the transformation of a city through processes of physical construction and destruction, presence and absence, remembering and forgetting. Joshua Arthurs P. ORANO, Gli ebrei in Italia, Roma, Pinciana, 1938, p. 53. Ibidem. 49 P. NORA, Entre mémoire et histoire, in Les lieux de mémoire, P. NORA (ed.), Paris, Gallimard, 1984, pp. XVII-XLI. 47 48