ICCS ROME

AND ITS NEIGHBORHOOD

The central (as it were) building at left is the Centro. It is a converted nunnery, the original chapel of which is in the foreground. A few nuns still live in a segregated part of the building. The interior has a kitchen and dining rooms in the basement, laundry facilities and a rec room on the (glassed-in) roof, and an elevator to help get heavy objects like suitcases up and down.

Usually 36 students live in an assortment of one-and two-person rooms on the two middle floors. The ground floor has a public TV, a computer room, offices for staff and faculty, a small library, a classroom, and a public phone.

The building is behind a wall and locked 24 hours a day (but violent crime is rare in Italy and not something one needs to worry too much about).

In the rear of the building you can see some trees. There is a small garden on the grounds at the disposal of the faculty and students.

This is the corner of the Via G. Carini and the Via Fratelli Bonnet. The latter changes its name to Via A. Algardi two blocks behind you; and it is precisely there, turned in the opposite direction, that the picture above was taken.

The two prominent yellow signs in the picture signal a bus stop. Very many Centro trips into the center of Rome begin under these signs. The city lies at the foot of the hill which just rises to its summit where the road goes under the arch. The Centro is about a 15-minute walk from the heart of ancient Rome, and about a 3-minute walk from what is probably Rome's finest park, the Villa Doria Pamphili. The Villa Pamphili is perfect for jogging, since the air is cooler there and is out of the staler air down in the city.

The massive wall in the background is a part of the Papal fortification of the city, though the ancient city wall ran very close by. This wall--and this portion of the wall--was the scene of bitter combat between French troops of Napoleon III and the Roman Republic under Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1849. The Romans had ended papal rule of the city and the French moved to restore the Francophilic Pope Pius IX. The streets (Carini, Bonnet, etc.) are named for Garibaldini killed in defense of the Republic.

(The city fell, suffering great damage. In 1870 the city was retaken by the democrats and a humiliating treaty was forced upon the papal aristocracy.)

This is the same intersection as in the last photo; the bus stop is over your left shoulder across the street. Two blocks dead ahead lies the Centro.

This scene is very typical of the modern (20th century) neighborhoods of Rome. Large apartment buildings called palazzi have commercial establishments on the ground floor. Many of these stores and businesses have white stone decorative facades like the ones across the street in this photo.

In this street, dead ahead, you will find: a dry cleaner's; a wine shop; two bars (in Italy a bar is open to the general public and sells more coffee, pastry, and lottery tickets than liquor); a small electronics store, and a tavola calda, which is a small restaurant where you can eat in or select food to go (it is very different from McDonald's-style fast food, however).

The traffic signals should look familiar. The word "avanti' for "walk" is different, but the color codes and conventions of layout of the signs are identical to here and obvious.

You will note that Italians drive much smaller cars than we do. That's because they pay roughly three times as much for gas. One way this street scene is atypical is that there is no traffic--a dead giveaway that these photos were taken in August when 90% of the Romans go to the sea for vacation.

This corner is a few blocks south of the Centro, near where the professors' apartments are. This photo, taken in the spring, shows more typical traffic than the last two.

On the right side of the intersection, across the street from the photographer, is a small kiosk. This is the typical form of an Italian newspaper stand, which also sells such indispensibles as bus tickets and phone cards. Americans are usually in for a shock when they see the nudity on magazine covers openly on display. Interestingly, sexual crimes are rare enough in Italy to be front page news. The World Herald Tribune is for sale in most kiosks and offers English news taken from papers like the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.

The bar in the distant center of the photo is an especially nice one; there is a wonderful pasta store in the little shop behind the newspaper kiosk. Not far away is a wonderful bookstore. On the other hand, there is also an avant garde bathroom store in this same block which sells items like clear plastic toilet seats with barbed wire embedded in them.

The windows of the apartments have the typical Italian blinds called 'persiani'. They roll straight up and down on a track and can be pushed out when fully down.

The Romans do not think they are ancient Romans. They are very glad to be Italians with their rich continuum of culture stretching from the end of antiquity.

Nevertheless, there are interesting mementos and deliberate echoes of the ancient city everywhere. This manhole cover--in the street that runs in front of the Centro--bears the seal, as it were, of the city government: SPQR, for Senatus Populusque Romanus, "the senate and people of Rome". It is an affectation one will find in many cities. In the microscopic hill town of Cori one finds the sign SPQC, etc.