No, Rome is not disgusting. It is not ugly, it is not neglected. It is not badly governed. Rome is simply not. It is not the true object of these actions. It is not even these actions. Or it’s all you would not have thought or thought it was. Getting there, leaving. What attracts you and repels you before and after. Honey and “garbage”. Rome “lives of” or “survives” and will never die of its faults. Indeed defects has none. It has precepts. Rules and secrets that no one knows, that many are cloaked in knowing. Or try to tear them, deny them, ignore them, delete them. Rome seems to shield itself, mirroring the ugliness that is made reminding everyone who it is.
I thought of all this by reading the re-edition of a collection of Roman things by Mario Verdone: ” Roman Moccoletti”(Edizioni Sabinae) Verdone Father should be said for those who obviously know that from Mario Verdone originates the most popular Carlo (and obviously the two other sons Luca, who signs the introduction, and Silvia) .But Mario Verdone has life to himself The first chair of cinema at the Magisterium – then comes the second of the equally great Guido Aristarco at Lettere, La Sapienza (which the writer has attended) and we are at the Italian origin of the studies of the Big Screen – but Verdone Padre was something more than a film teacher, and this collection does justice to the poliformity of his culture, in particular to his work as a Romanist, here segmented into pieces published in various magazines between the 1950s and 1980s.
Obviously Rome is protagonist through the most outstanding protagonists of its local literature. Beautiful on all, through analysis and corollaries of very specialized things. See, for example, the piece on the “Menemonic Timeline” with the tables reproduced.
Then Trilussa theatrically. The carnival and its moccoletti – the candles to be protected by keeping them lit while trying to extinguish the others – to which the title refers.
But together the personal memories of Mario Verone. Beautiful is that of the entrance to the first Roman house in Via del Gesù 62. A staircase and the other the memory of Federigo Tozzi, one of the most interesting writers in the twentieth century repertoire.
Roman life yes but not easy, not light. Here then the great Sienese (even Verdone has long lived in Siena) try to escape from Rome by the way of the RIB or the coast – Fregene and Maccarese in which we discover perhaps the first traces of pollution in a shepherd who reports on the Arrone and the memory of cows perished due to poor watering quality. Here is Rome in the posthumous novel “Gli egoisti” a corollary of attempted conquests told in forced stages that prelude to a “He wanted to love Rome and it was not possible”. And here we conclude that the answer is the flight because “Rome had not added anything to its nature” and “It went away from Rome, without bringing anything with it”. Although he had paid the city, he had given him roads of freedom.
